JAZZ REVIEW : Organ Project Serves Up Tasty Set

Want a recipe for a great jazz dish? Here’s the first step: Put three world-class jazz players together, give them a repertoire of basic blues pieces and book them into a small, intimate listening room. The second step? Switch on the electricity and make sure not to get wiped out by a blast of hotly seasoned energy.

That’s exactly what was cooked up Friday night at Le Cafe’s upstairs jazz room when organist Ronnie Foster, guitarist Perry Hughes and drummer Harvey Mason blended their considerable skills into a trio with the unassuming title of the Organ Project.

Mason has been one of the studio’s most sought-after drummers for nearly two decades, Foster is a well-known producer and Hughes a respected sideman. But the combination seemed to provoke even better results than one might have expected from such highly visible performers.

An opening blues number started swinging from note one and never stopped. Foster was all over the keyboard, doubling and quadrupling the time, jabbing out odd cross rhythms and sliding blues lines. Incredibly, he did all this while his feet were dancing a bass line across the organ foot pedals.

Hughes broke loose on “Hi Fly” with long, boppish lines in a series of octave-based phrases that would have done Wes Montgomery proud. A brisk version of “Milestones” followed, its voltage set on high with a galvanizing opening drum solo from Mason.

All in all, it was a jazz dish to savor--and hours worth of confirmation that, when the players are right and the feeling is real, enormously creative improvising can be generated from relatively modest musical sources.