Jazz Reviews : Harrison and Blanchard Trumpet ‘60s Innovations

In the early ‘60s, Miles Davis formed a quintet featuring saxophonist Wayne Shorter and pianist Herbie Hancock that evolved a new way of playing mainstream jazz. The band blended the groove and swing feel of post-bop music with the less harmonically and melodically structured improvisational stances established by reedmen Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane.

The style, which was intellectually stimulating and emotionally distant, became very popular.

Twenty-five years later, that “new” style is still very much in vogue, as reedman Donald Harrison and trumpeter Terence Blanchard clearly demonstrated Tuesday at Catalina Bar & Grill.

Fronting a quintet, these two excellent musicians played with bravura, power and precision. But the thrust behind the musical stories they told--stories which, as did those of their regal predecessors, reached the mind but missed the heart--was difficult to comprehend, and to follow.

Harrison’s opening “Let’s Go Off” typified the group’s hourlong presentation. A snippet of a melodic line led into a Blanchard solo that was underpinned by the surging rhythm team of pianist Cyrus Chestnut, bassist Rodney Whitaker and drummer Carl Allen, an energetic trio that consistently displayed empathy for the leaders.

The trumpeter exhibited a resourceful imagination, playing everything from compact phrases to high, singing wails, but his ideas seemed to have little to do with what his backing players offered. Harrison’s solo was equally obfuscating.

Only when Chestnut soloed, delivering some edgy, bluesy phrases, which Allen booted boisterously, did a continuity emerge, indicating that perhaps the band was playing the blues. Later, the band played a similarly vague treatment of the evergreen, “Softly as in a Morning’s Sunrise,” where only occasional melodic snatches seemed to have anything to do with the basis of the original tune.

Harrison and Blanchard, who close Sunday, have a solid group, but their music is not for everyone. They cook, but in an abstract manner.

Listeners looking for warmth and mellifluousness may not find this band to their taste. Those wanting edge and intellectuality most likely will.