JAZZ REVIEW : McLean Quartet Sizzles at Catalina Grill

Throughout his prolific career, from his debut recordings with Miles Davis in 1951 and his fervent work in the ‘60s up to his most recent appearances, an earthy passion has always been at the matrix of Jackie McLean’s music. Tuesday at Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood, the august alto saxophonist demonstrated that this cornerstone of his art form was firmly in place as he and his quartet soared through an eight-tune opening set that was received with resounding applause by the packed house.

Also intact was the leader’s charismatic sound, a multihued, human-like tone--made up of wails, shrieks, moans, sighs and laughter--that’s one of the most original voices in modern music and one that is immediately recognizable.

McLean and his fellows--Hotep Galeta, piano; Nat Reeves, bass, and Carl Allen, drums--crackled and sizzled like a live wire dancing on the ground as they performed such hard-driving yet very accessible tunes as the leader’s “Five,” Galeta’s “Knot the Blues” and Monk’s “ ‘Round Midnight.” The latter, which offered some respite from the high-energy treatments that dominated the performance, began with McLean offering a twisting, turning cadenza, followed by a melody chorus and solo where his notes cried as much as they sang.

Frameworks with a few repeating chords, rather than elaborate harmonic structures, and charging rhythms underpinned most of the originals, from the classic “Little Melonae,” where the altoist mixed edge and Angst with passages dotted with the color of a Matisse painting, to “Five,” where two swaying chords and two tempi--fast and very fast--gave the soloists a wide-open format to improvise on. Here as elsewhere, Galeta played with fluency and invention, including vaulting arpeggios, all-but-banged locked-hands chordings and fleet, squiggly lines in his solo.

Allen and Reeves bolstered the band with an empathetic foment that occasionally got out of hand, but nonetheless was perfectly suited to the material McLean, who closes Sunday, selected.