Bob
Brookmeyer at the Jazz Bakery on July 26,
2001
Bob
Brookmeyer
seated himself lankily on a stool on the
stage of the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles,
sighed a workman's sigh, and began to
play ''I Hear a Rhapsody'' on his valve
trombone.
He
worked out on it, all right, and on all
the rest of the numbers he played, from
''Time on My Hands'' to ''There Is No
Greater Love.'' It was jazz improvisation
at its most intense, soft-spoken but hard
core, the notes as clear and impartial as
if they were being written on the air
with a scoring pen, like those big chords
Linus used to play in ''Peanuts.''
Brookmeyer
poked the mike deep into the bell of his
instrument and began producing that
drawly, equable sound of his, buzzy and
furry and intimate. The brilliant
guitarist Larry Koonse, immaculate and
cool, gave the sound a silvery core as
the two exposed the text of whatever
familiar theme they had chosen.
Then
their trajectories would
begin to diverge as the then 67-year-old
Brookmeyer, an arranger and composer
whose grasp of harmonic motion is quite
profound, undertook his analysis,
professorial yet somehow saloon-based.
What you had expected would be this scale
or that would suffer the removal or
alteration of one note or another, and
now you were in the Schoenberg Institute
or the Parisian Room. Fed by the
ingenuity of drummer Mike Stephans,
similar experiments were conducted on
rhythmic aspects as the group played such
tunes as "It's You or No One,"
"Yesterdays" and "Taking a
Chance on Love."
Underpinned
by bassist Darek Oles, the rhythm section
was just as sublime as the two soloists,
the guitarist rooted in Johnny Smith and
Jim Hall and the trombonist in Juan Tizol
and would you accept Sonny Rollins?
The
pitifully sparse crowd
was treated to a bit of jazz history:
Brookmeyer playing the piano for the
first time in public in 30 years. That
would put it back about the time he
replaced Chet Baker in the Gerry Mulligan
quartet in L.A. but before he became a
founding member of the Thad Jones Mel
Lewis Orchestra in New York.
On
this Monday night, May 29, 1996, he gave
his Los Angeles audience deep and
unprecedented versions of "I Can't
Get Started" and "Body and
Soul," joining Sarah Vaughan in the
ranks of performers of whom it is
whispered ''and you should hear them play
the piano!"
So
a few years later, you
knew what you were going to hear before
you heard it, with Brookmeyer on the
bandstand at the Bakery, down the street
from the old MGM studios. It would be the
opposite of Kid Ory, that tailgating,
hee-hawing slush-pumper of the Dixieland
era. Not a slide trombonist but a valve
trombonist: cool, intellectual, witty,
innovative, probing, masterful.
"If
I Loved You" was hardly recognizable
as the majestic bit of cornball that John
Riatt sang the week before to open the
Hollywood Bowl for the 2001 season. No.
It trotted along at a impudent pace while
the 71-year-old master unwrapped each
chord and distributed its goodies
expertly across the proper measures.
The
famed Brookmeyer sound was furry and
exact, amplified by a microphone across
the bell of the instrument that gave it a
forced intimacy, like a guy trying to
dance too close to a girl. Still, the
sound was big and glowing as Gerry
Mulligan's old partner devised a phrase,
swung it, kidded it, kissed it and hooked
it up to the next one.
The
effect was a little like watching a
professional deal cards in Vegas, except
tonight there was more than one joker in
the deck.
Larry
Koonse, the guitarist, was
one wild card. His elaborative prowess
was by no means unequal to that of his
older bandmate, and Brookmeyer watched
him attentively as he took the harmonies
in some rather unexpected directions ---
not that the trombonist had not visited
these zones himself on other nights, you
understand.
Mike
Stephans, the drummer and poet, was
another, light-fingered but powerful and
marshaling a palette of unusual
percussion colors: Sighs and gusts from
the cymbals, tiny ticks and tocks from
the sticks. Bob Hurst was more fleet and
more innovative than the usual bassist,
and that's saying something in this town.
And
for trumps, Brookmeyer
deployed his lean and lanky frame on the
bench of the grand piano and gave the
audience an account of "It Could
Happen to You" that was also lean
and lanky, moving along like an
underwater Lennie Tristano, especially in
its closing unpredictable chord sequence.
And
amid the brisk and richly redecorated fox
trots, "Polka Dots and
Moonbeams," "Stella by
Starlight," "I'm Glad There is
You," the sophisticated gentleman of
swing stashed a waltz, titled in honor of
his wife, "Janet Planet."
Brookmeyer and Koonse played follow the
leader and then lead the follower in
their star-studded way, and you knew that
the marriage must be killer.
