JAZZ REVIEW : Pioneers, Newcomers Blend Styles at JVC Festival Concerts

Selecting veteran pianist Cecil Taylor and rising young alto saxophonist Steve Coleman as headliners for the final pair of JVC Jazz Festival concerts here offered the opportunity to compare old and new champions of the jazz world’s most adventurous wing.

Taylor was one of the pioneers of the “avant-garde” jazz wing more than 30 years ago with his densely structured, highly kinetic style. Coleman recently has been attracting media attention as the focal point of the M-Base (Macro-Basic Array of Structured Experimentation) group of young Brooklyn-based improvisers.

But both men delivered flawed sets that underlined their divergent musical styles rather than their similarities.

The weekend concerts were the finale of the five-day “Knitting Factory Goes Uptown” series at the 1,100-seat Alice Tulley Hall at Lincoln Center. Stung in recent years by repeated criticism of conservative programming, the JVC Jazz Festival agreed to produce the five-concert series as the spotlight events of the Knitting Factory Club’s three-week festival of alternative improvised music.

Steve Coleman was the biggest “name” of the M-Base collaborative to perform, but Alice Tulley Hall was only one-third filled for his performance Friday night. M-Base looks to draw from the most dynamic elements of contemporary popular music--funk, hip-hop, Third World rhythms and advanced electronics of the digital/computer music era--as the foundation for serious improvising.

It’s the same model used by Miles Davis, Weather Report, John McLaughlin and Chick Corea in formulating the fusion sound in the early ‘70s. But Coleman’s problematic 90-minute set only raised the question of whether it’s a case of meet the new fusion, same as the old fusion.

The unexplained absence of trumpeter Graham Haynes put more pressure on keyboard player James Wydman and guitarist David Gilmore and, while the latter sported a pleasingly clean, bluesy tone, neither displayed the skill to sustain their ideas over extended solos. Coleman did, though, whether his liquid solos were leading the full ensemble anchored by bassist Kevin Harris’ funk grooves, and Marvin (Smitty) Smith’s limber drums, or employing darting, fragmented phrases and sudden octave glides during a brief duet treatment of “ ‘Round Midnight.”

But Coleman and Five Elements never quite escaped the shadow of Davis or early Weather Report, even when Coleman used an alto hooked to a synthesizer to create a swirling futuristic tone.

Cecil Taylor has never had any trouble with creating a personal musical language, but his performance Saturday, dedicated to half-a-dozen prominent deceased jazz musicians, tossed a curve at the audience with its relatively restrained attack.

The single, 45-minute piece began with three minutes of offstage chanting and percussion before Taylor, bassist William Parker and percussionist Greg Bendian danced on stage. Taylor then used rumbling bass chords to fashion his lyrical opening statement, but the surprising factor was how frequently he returned to passages marked by that kind of lyricism, or employed stop-start dynamics that were unusual by his standards.

Parker struggled with what may be an insoluble problem--how to fit his bass into music that doesn’t really require a bass. Bendian, a late replacement, engaged Taylor in a few lightning-quick exchanges on vibes, but generally lacked the experience and reaction speed to be an effective foil. Taylor’s performance was sporadically involving, but it would have been much more effective as a solo set.

The weekend’s most successful, albeit wildly uneven, performance came from the Jazz Passengers’ blend of puckish humor and unusual instrumentation. Even their mistakes in judgment--two pieces played strictly for laughs followed by a haunting version of “St. James Infirmary” that was obliquely but tellingly updated to the AIDS age by a brief spoken intro--underscored the jazz passengers’ delightful unpredictability.