Jazz Reviews : Vital Information Invigorates at the Baked Potato

The bane of most contemporary bands is the tendency to slowly slide into a compositional mire, with far too many of a group’s tunes sounding as if they’d been cloned. Fortunately, the audience at the Baked Potato on Monday was spared another exposure to this musical version of the plague as Steve Smith’s jazz/rock quintet, Vital Information, played a 90-minute set where variety was exalted.

Though most of the tunes were underpinned by some form of a rock, funk or pop rhythm, the cohesive team of drummer Smith, bassist Tim Landers, keyboardist Tom Coster and guitarist Mike Miller played with enough togetherness and snap to make things cook within circumstances that, in lesser hands, might have been quite limiting.

Smith--who, though he sat stage center, didn’t overwhelm his cohorts--offered a pleasing array of tunes selected from his recent “Fiafiaga” and other CBS LPs. They ranged from “Sunday Afternoon,” a sturdy, mainstream jazz/rock piece to “Jave With a Nail,” a Latinesque number that would serve as perfect accompaniment for cruising the Big Sur coast route with the top down, and the sensuous, undulating “Europa,” the well-known Coster-Carlos Santana song.

Coster and saxman Bob Sheppard walked off with solo honors. The keyboardist, revealing a crisp, modern sound, segued back and forth between complex, darting lines and thick, foggy chords on the reggae-ish “Johnny Kat,” while on “Sunday Afternoon,” he played twirling figures and chords that could have been climbing hills, ending with a tasty funk feeling.

Sheppard scored on “Kat,” where he balanced zipping lines with single notes played as if they were exclamation points, and on “Europa” and “Celebration,” where his warm tenor sax tone stood out. On the latter, Miller played deftly, picking his ringing tones carefully, and without hurry.

Smith soloed on occasion, and while he is technically well-equipped, his thuddy bass and tom-tom drum sound, and an assortment of cymbals that jangled rather than rang, detracted from his efforts.