JAZZ REVIEW : Two Nashes at Alfonse’s

Generational couplings are by now so common in jazz that a father-and-son team such as Dick and Ted Nash should seem neither surprising nor incompatible. Tuesday evening at Alfonse’s they made what has become an annual local appearance; since saxophonist Ted Nash now lives in New York, he is seen in these parts only when he drops in for a holiday season, tied in with a gig.

Just as surely as bop was the common parlance in the developmental days of 28-year-old Ted Nash, his father was the product of an era in which swing music was the lingua franca. In fact, most trombonists of Dick Nash’s younger days (he is 60) came up under the influence of Tommy Dorsey or Jack Teagarden, yet it was clear in his every solo that he later absorbed most efficiently the post-J. J. Johnson influence.

With the younger Nash doubling on alto and tenor saxophones, the pairing works as well as can be expected under these ad hoc and ad lib conditions. There were virtually no arrangements except for a first and last chorus played mainly in unison, and the usual string of solos in between. Usual, that is, in their predictable sequence, but the creative force generated was at a consistently high level.

Ted Nash played a dazzling set of five choruses on Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite.” His father dealt persuasively with Tadd Dameron’s “Good Bait” and a Horace Silver piece called “Gregory Is Here.”

Lou Levy on piano and Monty Budwig on bass shared the solo space compellingly, with Nick Martinis on drums rounding out an adequate if less than inspired rhythm section. The set ended with an ebullient round robin on the Sonny Rollins blues “Sonnymoon for Two”--an apt finale, since the blues has been the universal language of jazz since long before the Nash dynasty began.