JAZZ REVIEW : Winners, Losers at Day Two of Playboy Festival

On a thumbs-up, thumbs-down basis, the second day of the Playboy Jazz Festival Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl was an 8-to-3 victory.

Two of the three downers were the opening and closing acts. Henry Gibson Jr., a keyboardist leading a trio, was on at 2 p.m. as winner of a talent award that should have been a dubious achievement award. Among other noble gestures, he played a hand-held keyboard behind his neck. Seven-and-a-half hours later, there were the Neville Brothers.

Audience communication climax? There was that magical moment when Wynton Marsalis, topping off an hour of serious music, jumped into a simplistic, Dirty Dozen-type Dixieland ditty with a beat so infectious that within moments, the just-under 18,000 capacity crowd became a sea of waving handkerchiefs and hats.

Surprise climax? Welcome to the newest instrument in jazz--the banjo. True, it was here in the 1920s but crept silently away until Bela Fleck came along playing avant-garde banjo (oxymoron though that may be), using simple minor riff melodies along with wildly futuristic sounds.

Among his sidemen was Roy Wooten, playing what looked like a weird string instrument but was in fact synth-axe drumitar. Using his fingers as drumsticks, Wooten drew from this box noises that may, as he said, indicate where percussion will be in 2050. Virtuoso climax? It came early, on the heels of the hapless Henry Gibson. Arturo Sandoval, the Cuban defector now living in Miami, is a trumpeter who has every idiom at his command, with the technique to match. He repeated his recent Vine St. Bar & Grill triumph, and reappeared later as a sideman with Dizzy Gillespie.

Creative climax? The Toshiko Akiyoshi Orchestra, featuring the leader’s compositions as well as piano, and the peerless tenor sax and flute of Lew Tabackin, was a marvel throughout. Frank Wess on alto evoked memories of Johnny Hodges with Akiyoshi’s “Fading Beauty.” Lewis Nash, the band’s new drummer, kept the 5/4 beat consistently alive through “Feast in Milan.”

Anticlimax? You had that too, when Tower of Power took over. One critic described this group in 1983 as “a near forgotten relic.” Alas, he was wrong. The 1970s rock band that sings, “What is hip?” but never knew the answer is not only still around, it drew a standing ovation from an audience that promptly yakked its way through a John McLaughlin Trio set. The guitarist’s complex music requires close attention, but by now it was Twilight Talking time, which always arrives here soon after 6 p.m.

Jazz Futures was the name of an ad-hoc group of musicians from 18 to 30 that made a stunning impact mainly by harking back to the Art Blakey genre of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Marlon Jordan and Roy Hargrove on trumpets, Benny Green on piano and Mark Whitfield on guitar stood out. Are all these young men trying to tell us that hope for the future lies in allegiance to the past?

Ruth Brown showed how much a great backup band can help a singer. With Bobby Forrester’s organ, two saxes and rhythm, she mixed new items with 1950s hits. At 63, she retains the assurance of her blues years.

Wynton Marsalis by now has become the grand old man of the great young Turks of 1980. Both the trumpeters in Jazz Futures are among his many proteges. Marsalis now boasts a four-horn group that has enabled him to convey much of what happened before, during and after the 1960s Miles Davis image with which he was long identified. Some of his charts have an early Ellington flavor. His trombonist, Wycliffe Gordon, even resembled Duke’s legendary Lawrence Brown.

The leader’s own command of the ballad form was represented in an elegant reading of “Stardust.” Aside from some overblown tenor by Todd Williams, the other soloists, notably the 20-year-old pianist Eric Reed, acquitted themselves admirably.

Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nation Band, with sidemen from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Brazil and other distant points, came together in a mainly Afro-Cuban bag. There was even a move into a semi-classical mode when the pianist Danilo Perez teamed with the Cuban Paquito d’Rivera on clarinet.

Pacing himself carefully, Gillespie shared trumpet honors with Arturo Sandoval, whose range must be close to 99 octaves, and Claudio Roditi. As always, there was a long workout on “Night in Tunisia,” which Gillespie wrote almost 50 years ago.

From Gillespie we were hurled into the Mardi Gras madness of the Neville Brothers, who represent the antithesis of both the other New Orleans groups at the festival. They have neither the crude charm of the Rebirth Brass Band nor the pure authenticity of Marsalis. There was no justification for closing a jazz festival with this act.

Still, the balance sheet worked out much to the credit of producer George Wein. Perhaps by next year he can be persuaded that a financial sellout may be achieved without the selling out of any musical principles.