JAZZ REVIEW : Metropolitan Boptet Warms Chadney’s

The downstairs bar at Chadney’s Restaurant in Burbank has the feel and the ambience of a ‘50s jazz room--dark wood paneling, mirrored walls and a cozy, club-like feeling.

It was appropriate, therefore, that Thursday night’s group--the Metropolitan Boptet--played a program dominated by mainstream pieces, many of them from the ‘40s and ‘50s. The group’s leader, trumpeter Scott Scheuerman, programmed a series of pieces associated with everyone from Clifford Brown and Fats Navarro to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.

The bad news is that the Boptet was missing several of its regular members. The good news is that their replacements were Frank Strazzeri on piano, Chuck Manning on tenor saxophone and Tom White on drums. While there were some obvious problems with the written passages of pieces like “Nardis” and “I Can Dream, Can’t I,” the solo work--especially by Strazzeri, Manning and White--was first-rate.

To Scheuerman’s credit, he is trying to maintain a repertoire of jazz works that might easily be forgotten in the contemporary rush toward original music at all costs. But the works are difficult, their harmonies demanding, and there were times when Scheuerman’s trumpet solos and Jesse Murphy’s (the only other regular member of the Boptet present) bass improvisations struggled with both the chord changes and the contextual framework of the music.

Still, the preservation of classic jazz repertoire is a task worth doing, and the Boptet is giving it a good shot. And, when the thrust of the music sometimes waned on Thursday night, there was always the laid-back, relaxed atmosphere of Chadney’s jazz room to help bring things back into perspective.