By turns glorious and garish, the disjointed concert Friday night in Symphony Center summed up the haphazard nature of jazz programming there.
To open the evening, two esteemed jazz musicians, saxophonist Wayne Shorter and pianist Herbie Hancock, produced profound improvisations, in the process nearly vanquishing the acoustical shortcomings of the refurbished Chicago hall.
To end the evening, saxophonist Joe Lovano and a large ensemble offered a leaden “tribute” to Frank Sinatra that was rendered worse by the hall’s over-reverberant new acoustics.
The schizophrenic evening was started well, with Shorter and Hancock’s sublime duets. Though their half of the program was dubbed “1+1,” after their recent Verve recording, the concert far outdid the CD. Strong as it is, the recording clearly represents an early stage in the Shorter-Hancock duet project.
In concert, the two musicians achieved considerably more harmonic complexity, rhythmic freedom and lyric fervor than on the recording. The months they have spent touring the world with this repertoire clearly has brought added intensity to their musical dialogue, as well as an increased willingness to venture into distant keys, unconventional rhythms and unpredictable turns of phrase.
If the hall’s overamplification stripped Shorter’s tone of much of its character and subtlety, the perpetual creativity and variety of his melodic ideas very nearly compensated. His is a music that can shift to a different tonal center every couple of bars or so, the harmony dictated by the free-ranging course of the melody line, rather than the other way around.
Shorter also knows how to build a solo, maintaining a charismatic narrative line from first note to last. The sprawling soliloquy he offered on his own “Footprints” and the relentlessly chromatic chord changes he implied in Hancock’s “Sonrisa” pointed to an improviser-composer who–in Hancock’s company–is creating some of the more original music of the mature part of his career.
For his part, Hancock produced accompanying passages that coyly avoided rhythmic backbeat or clearly defined chord progressions. This was improvisation that emphasized harmonic ambiguity and ravishing melodic beauty above all else. More than once, Hancock verged on an Impressionistic musical vocabulary, his lush glissandi and extended chords recalling piano works by Debussy and Ravel.
These two ought to consider revisiting the recording studio when this tour is finished–the second duets’ release would be a quantum leap over the first.
Lovano’s “Celebrating Sinatra” set was virtually ruined by the hall’s echo-chamber amplification, though the headliner was not blameless. The shrill and torpid vocals of Judi Silvano, the rhythmically sluggish playing of the ensemble and the precious nature of the arrangements did not help matters.
