JAZZ REVIEW : Joe Pass and Ray Brown at Loa

Although Joe Pass and Ray Brown have similar backgrounds, they had never worked together simply as a duo until Thursday night, when they began a three-night stint at the Loa. A capacity crowd braved the rain to witness this unprecedented event.

Pass opened the show alone, playing his guitar mostly finger style, holding the pick in his mouth and assuming the body-all-aching-and-wracked-with-pain expression that traditionally accompanies (and belies) his performance.

Through a series of standards (“If I Should Lose You,” “All the Things You Are,” Victor Young’s “Beautiful Love”), he moved with cat-like grace, chording the melody, adding long, complex interstices and furnishing his own rhythmic undercurrent. Not until he moved into a lickety-split series of 16th notes on a blues was his scowl at last transformed into a smile.

Then came Ray Brown, who of course is the Joe Pass of the bass (and, of course, vice versa). Pass now used the pick more often; knowing that Brown would relieve him of the necessity to be his own rhythm section, he leaned more toward those lightning single note lines that the plectrum can facilitate.

“But Beautiful” was just that, with a give-and-take exchange of closing cadenzas so mutually stimulating that the two men seemed reluctant to quit. Pass embellished Brown’s splendid arco solo on “Round Midnight” before the two wound up this dazzling session with “I Got Rhythm.”

That the interaction throughout was totally spontaneous goes without saying; these two artists are so familiar with each other’s personalities that to prepare for the evening would have been about as necessary as rehearsing a ballgame. With Pass and Brown it was clear in advance that the Loa was Home Run City.