Hello, generation next
The Young Jazz Giants,
clockwise from top: Ronald Bruner Jr., Zane Musa, Aaron West, Ryan
Porter, Cameron Graves and Stephen Bruner.
No
sooner had they reached the stage than the Young Jazz
Giants were off at a full gallop, all of them advancing like seasoned
thoroughbreds.
Drummer Ronald Bruner Jr., splashed shock waves of electric blue to fuel
the output of the three-man front line, each of whom demonstrated a highly
evolved personality.
“Yenne,” the first piece was called, and trombonist Ryan Porter began it
with a long stream of fresh phrases the derivation of which remained so
tenuous that you had to say they were all original. Could this be?
Sure enough, the next man, tenor saxophonist Aaron West, supplied a ration
of passionate hot stuff that did not remind you of John Coltrane or anyone
else that came readily to mind. It sounded like that old devil spontaneous
improvisation, once regarded as the sine qua non of jazz. Zane Musa, the
alto man, played the same sort of hand, not a stale hoary phrase in his
vocabulary, either.
You
began to think that you were going to have fun, like the
old days, and that is just what happened.
Not only was the playing great, but the stuff was well written. “Dirty
Laundry,” a slower, bluesy number with a theme like Horace Silver used to
write for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, came next, and the quality level
of the solos remained up around the top of the scale while the giants
stepped in, out and around the changes.
Drummer Bruner supplied a dandy little street beat to start “Rain,’ from
which Porter, West, Musa and fertile pianist Cameron Graves derived
variations in deliciously ingenious ways.
Bass
guitarist Stephen Bruner, the brother of Ronald, began
the set’s most inventive number (which is saying something) with an
arresting figure that had touches of flamenco. “Spider Walk” – from the
giants’ new CD on Birdman --- had only a couple of chords, four bars of
one, four bars of the other, and the succession of figures Stephen Bruner
spun out for the soloists to ride on was miraculous or at least very
surprising.
Here Graves, who wrote the piece, strung together a series of jewel like
phrases worthy of Igor Stravinsky, lacey and bitonal and who knows
what-all, ending in a percussive section that was not boring at all, which
it could have been in less wise hands.
Ronald Bruner went windmilling into his variations on that section, but
stopped in the middle and called it a set… just to end it all on the sound
of surprise. Generation next was giving us a friendly hello.
The Young Jazz Giants at work on Sept. 27,
2004, at Catalina's in Hollywood.
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