JAZZ REVIEW : Carrington Has Fun at Le Cafe

Monday evening at Le Cafe in Sherman Oaks, the 24-year-old drummer Terri Lyne Carrington informed her audience that she and her fellow musicians were just having fun and that the music would be non-electric. “I hope you’re not disappointed,” she added.

No apology was called for. The quartet set its sights higher than Carrington did on her recent album. There were no pop songs, no vocals, no commercial concessions. The outcome was a dazzling performance by four brilliant young musicians (in this company, pianist Patrice Rushen at 35 seemed like a veteran).

Carrington announced that she would play some “obscure standards,” though to most of the crowd such vehicles as “Solar” by Miles Davis and “Oleo” by Sonny Rollins could hardly have been unfamiliar. The ballads, Charles Lloyd’s “Forest Flower” and Horace Silver’s “Peace,” also are well-enough known to most jazz fans.

These tunes provided perfect settings for Greg Osby, whose alto sax was tough, fluent and never derivative; for Rushen, who too rarely has a chance to stretch out on a straight-ahead jazz basis and, most remarkably, for Brian Bromberg, whose technique on the upright bass is as original as Stanley Jordan’s on the guitar. His left hand at times performed duties normally reserved for the right hand, and vice versa; sometimes both at once, producing lines and chords and rhythmic convolutions that almost defied belief.

Carrington’s drums kept a firm hold, her time feeling impeccable, her drive and power catalytically irresistible. Once in a while, her offbeat bass drum accents tended to dominate excessively, like so many thunder claps, but overall she sustained the unity of this virtually new group (Bromberg had never worked with her before).

Carrington’s idea of “just having fun” deserves recorded preservation. One can only hope that her next CD will be fashioned along these unswervingly mettlesome lines.