The band kiosk was full of players who were presumably very happy with the result of the Super Bowl Lix.
“This band is known as’ Four of us are from Philadelphia and one of us is not, ” joked the legendary pianist Kenny Barron when he presented his quintet to a house full of jazz lovers on Thursday night (April 10) at the Sjazz Center.
Of course, Mike Rodríguez comes from Queens, instead of the city of fraternal love, but we like to believe that the trumpeter still had the good taste to enjoy seeing the Philadelphia Eagles triumph over Taylor Swift and the bosses of Kansas City.
However, with regard to pure enjoyment, that grill confrontation what had nothing about what Barron and Company, Rodriquez, bassist Christian McBride, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins and drummer Johnathan Blake, delivered.
They were 90 minutes of pure happiness of jazz when Barron began the first of the four nights in Sfjazz. It will act in a different environment every night, following the Quintet concert on Thursday with a solo piano show on Friday and a performance with a camera orchestra on Saturday. Barron plans to close the race on Sunday with the premiere of the west coast of a new camera work with the Grégoire Maret Harmonic player, the flutist Elena Ponderhughes and the cellist Noah Johnson. (He also plans to play two trio sets with exhausted tickets at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz on Monday).
All those very different shows should be exciting in their own way, and, in the end, the tickets were still available for the dates of Barron Sfjazz in Sfjazzz.com. However, it is difficult to imagine that any of them will lead what we saw of the pianist and his steady by the sidemen achieved on Thursday.
From the moment the first note was played in the opening interpretation of the legendary “footprints” of Wayne Shorter, the group was working absolutely in the pocket and emerging together as if they shared their legs for years. The feeling of synergy was ravaged, since the styles and contributions of the players quickly fell together as pieces of a puzzle, and it was surprising to learn that all this was happening what was the first time this particular quintet.
How is that only possible?
“All of you get one of those special quintets,” McBride would tell me after the show.
The group stressed that statement in each step of this performance, going from an epic version of 20 minutes of “footprints”, which offered fleshy potential customers of all, expect McBride-Right in a gorgous ours in the “place” Beagic, Beagic “(with both Wilkins and Blake).
McBride achieved a good attention center in “Tragic Magic”, grabbing the moment and its bass with those powerful hands of his and delivering an amazing rhythmic exploration after another. Yes, the bassist comes from Philadelphia, but jazz fans of the Bay area would be apologized for thinking that it could be a local thesis, given the amount of time that has passed in Sfjazz and in other places recently. In recent weeks, McBride has made several nights with his own Major Ursa band, as well as part of a trio with the pianist Brad Mehldau and Marcus Gilmore, before returning to Sfjazz for a position of one night.
The four companions led to the stage after “Tragic Magic”, leaving Barron alone in the piano to work his magic, well, a melody with which he momentarily forgot the title.
“Don’t worry, I will play it,” he told the crowd. “And you can tell me what it is.”
Baron, an 81 -year -old band leader who has appeared in hungry of recordings that lasted a race that dates back to the early 60s, sounded great in everything he played and seemed excited to work in front of a band with fire power.
The group really flexed its collective muscle in the Latin jazz dance melody “thoughts and dreams”, a Barron’s original from “Sing Brazil” of 2002, and then its game at a higher level the same with a glorious d’n’n ” ” ‘.
The group closed the show satisfactorily with “Dance”, another original by Barron, this time from the work of Quintet of 2018 “concentric circles”. And then, the legendary pianist was finally willing to share something that he would maintain on the legs of the members of the audience, and, honestly, we could never have guessed, Puerta del Show. And the great revelation was that the middle finger in his right hand was Kured and “hurt like hell” while acting.
“I was in my best moment,” Barron admitted. “But I did my best.”
Hey, he certainly did. And the result was an absolute pleasure to contemplate. It is firmly that jazz fans of the Bay area do the same and try to catch Barron in concert this weekend.
Originally published: