In a city that’s home to tenor saxophone giants such as Von Freeman and Fred Anderson, even the most accomplished players can be overshadowed.
But anyone who has heard Ari Brown through the decades knows that he ranks among the greatest Chicago tenor men, a vibrantly intense player who commands attention on his own stylistic terms.
Listeners who doubt it should have swung by the Green Mill Jazz Club over the weekend, when Brown reiterated — in unmistakable terms — the majesty of his tone, the eloquence of his melodic ideas and the distinctiveness of his approach to jazz improvisation. For if Freeman creates solos of baroque complexity, if Anderson unfurls long and extraordinarily sinuous lines, Brown stakes out a very different expressive realm.
His is an earthy, straightforward, no-nonsense approach, a music that merges the searing power of blues phrasing with a palpable sense of spirituality and repose. Where lesser players often go to great lengths to embellish their ideas with ornate technical display, Brown pursues exactly the opposite approach, stripping away extraneous material to cut to the core of the tune at hand.
The directness of this style of playing, combined with the sheer size and luster of Brown’s sound, makes for some of the most effective tenor work to be encountered in Chicago today. There’s a barreling force to Brown’s playing, a timbral beauty and rhythmic fervor that will not be denied.
You could hear it in the original music from his 1998 Delmark album “Venus,” Brown bringing a mesmerizing, chant-like quality to his work on tenor and soprano saxophones. Playing a few spare notes where others might produce an avalanche, Brown distilled his tunes to their essence. Yet he maintained listener interest through the deep-amber burnish of his tone and the long arc of his phrases.
Not that Brown can’t play bebop with the best of them. In “Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise,” he easily articulated the running figures and headlong rhythmic momentum that are the heart of this music. But even here, Brown went out of his way to emphasize key melody notes and to trace the broad outline of the tune, in effect welcoming even the most casual listener into the music making.
To their credit, the rest of the band matched the back-to-basics nature of Brown’s work, with particularly effective, blues-based statements from pianist Kirk Brown (the saxophonist’s brother).
During Friday evening’s performance, Brown shared the stage with the Chicago poet G’Ra, whose magnificent bass-baritone thundered in soliloquies on race, justice and other epic themes.
“We have the evidence,” G’Ra railed. “The evidence is in the groove!”
Brown’s tenor saxophone was Exhibit A.
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hreich@tribune.com
