SOUND WOES IN CARNEGIE HALL, NOT IN CLUBS : JAZZ FESTIVAL ENDS ON HIGH, LOW NOTES

The 10-day JVC Jazz Festival ended Sunday after a typically diverse series of concerts. Despite much first-rate music, there was no shortage of brickbats, many of them aimed at the sound system in Carnegie Hall, where nine of the principal events took place.

This venerable acoustic venue has become an electronic nightmare. Big bands were reduced to a jumbled blur. Many who had paid a $28.50 top price heard every note twice: first live and then a fraction of a second later, amplified.

Although better monitored than some others, the Friday program starring Mel Torme, featuring guest singer Diane Schuur, had to deal with these problems. Torme and Schuur have been reviewed here recently. Lonette McKee, in her Carnegie debut, offered an agreeable version of “How Long Has This Been Going On,” which she sang in the movie “ ‘Round Midnight.” Tall, very slender, with a Las Vegas theatrical personality, she tackled a pair of Billie Holiday songs, revealed her superficial understanding of jazz in “Cloudburst” and duetted successfully with Torme.

The Mel Lewis big band, heard off and on throughout the evening, battled the sound system until Stan Getz, walking on in the middle of a song, became the Atlas who lifted the entire orchestra on his eloquent horn. Getz stayed on stage to introduce and accompany Schuur.

Fortunately the festival was confined neither to Carnegie Hall nor to concert halls in general. Several nightclubs, taking advantage of the international influx of visiting jazz fans, became part of the multiple celebrations.

Some of the most creative music, as well as the best reproduced sound, was presented by the Toshiko Akiyoshi Orchestra during her three-night stand at the Blue Note, a downtown club that now rivals the Village Vanguard in the consistency of its presentations.

Akiyoshi’s compositions and arrangements gave striking evidence of the advances made in orchestral writing, in contrast to the swing era works presented the previous evening in the retrospective by the American Jazz Orchestra. The suspensions and changes of tempo, the use of many keys and shifting themes within the body of a given piece, were beyond the scope of the early bands, with the exception of Duke Ellington’s.

Where the saxophones were once largely confined to that instrument, Akiyoshi makes richly textured use of saxes, piccolos, flutes, clarinets and bass clarinets in a dazzling variety of colors.

Even the blues takes on a fresh character under the guidance of her pen: “Feast in Milano,” part of a suite, is a dashing blues in 5/4 time. Reflecting her ethnic heritage, Akiyoshi at one point used the taped sounds of Japanese Noh drummers.

Among the orchestra’s gallery of soloists is Lew Tabackin, the stunningly virtuosic flutist who also is to the tenor saxophone in the 1980s what Sonny Rollins was in the 1950s. Akiyoshi herself let loose with some ferocious Bud Powell piano in “March of the Tadpoles,” a neo-be-bop line that made vivid use, singly and collectively, of the four trombonists.

Another superb pianist, Roger Kellaway, was heard in a solo recital Saturday at Weill Hall. Kellaway’s gifts are so formidable that he seems unsure of which direction to aim. On this occasion he leaned toward New Age music in a series of his own compositions that were at one time or another impressionistic, dissonant, gospel-tinged, evocative and, once in a while, soporific--something one would not have expected of an artist who so often has generated tremendous excitement.

Only in the final five minutes did Kellaway turn to uncompromising jazz for a wildly original version of “Here’s That Rainy Day.” One could not help wishing that he had changed the program to favor a little more fully that aspect of his talent.