JAZZ REVIEW : Horace Silver Group at Catalina Bar & Grill

Horace Silver’s music is a pure evocation of the sound of the city. With many of his contemporaries who appeared on the jazz scene in the ‘50s, he helped create a style of jazz that called up images of steaming urban streets and sparkling towers of light tinged with a rumbling undercurrent of night noise.

Much of the effectiveness of Silver’s work--or, for that matter, of Art Blakey’s or Donald Byrd’s--depended upon an interaction between the composed notes and the improvisations of a group of hard-edged soloists who brought the aggressive clamor and energy of the metropolis to the music.

Tuesday night at Catalina Bar & Grill, Silver opened with a group whose playing only occasionally managed to make that interaction take place. In one sense that was no real problem, since the pianist’s works are among the gems of the post-World War II jazz repertoire, and it clearly is a pleasure to hear him perform them, regardless of the circumstances.

But in the sense that his music, at its best, is a complex blend of composed melody and sudden improvisational spontaneity, the performance left a bit to be desired.

Front line soloists Ralph Bowen on tenor saxophone and Vincent Cutro on trumpet were only intermittently effective. Not until his solo on the closing “Song for My Father” did Bowen finally establish a real contact with the music, and Cutro seemed out of sync with the proceedings in general.

It remained for Silver--with the strong support of bassist Phil Bowler and drummer Carl Burnett--to provide the kind of improvising that brought the music to life.

On the eccentric 5/4 rhythms of “The Gods of the Yoruba,” he played a series of dissonant clusters and disjunct rhythms strikingly reminiscent of Thelonious Monk.

On “Nica’s Dream” and a new piece, “Compassion” (both sung to perfection by Andy Bey), Silver strung together colorful choruses that included quotes from other tunes, be-bop licks, crisp chording and the precise rhythmic phrasing that always has been his trademark.

But Silver’s yeoman soloing only brought things into intermittent focus. For his current group to be as good as it can and should be, it may need a real shot of urban energy.

Horace Silver continues at Catalina through Sunday.