Jazz : Talent Shows at Wadsworth Fest

The Wadsworth Theater was woefully empty for the second event in the weekend’s fourth annual L.A. Jazz ’91 Festival.

With a lineup that included, among others, James Newton, Bennie Maupin and Horace Tapscott, the Saturday program was not exactly a high-visibility presentation. But star power is not always the best indication of quality, and L.A. Jazz ‘91’s assemblage of such talented young performers as the Black/Note Quintet and the B Sharp Quintet provided a far more accurate picture of the current state of jazz than did most of the more enthusiastically publicized events of the summer.

The B Sharp group, opening the evening to an audience of about 200, made an impressive plea for the continuing vitality of free, Ornette Coleman-like improvisation. Alto saxophonist Randall Willis, in particular, had the sound and substance of a talent to be watched.

Black/Note seemed equally committed to acoustic jazz, but with a strong orientation toward straight-ahead soloing based on familiar standards. Working without their regular drummer and pianist, trumpeter Richard Grant and saxophonist James Mahone nonetheless played a series of articulate solos.

The always provocative Tapscott’s somewhat overextended set leaped across stylistic boundaries. Both his solos and his music blended stirring, Cecil Taylor rhythmic densities with Thelonious Monk melodic whimsy.

The top-billed All-Stars, with Newton, Maupin, Cecil Bridgewater, George Bohannon, Larance Marable, Tony Dumas and last-minute addition Billy Childs, were predictably dependable. Childs did even more, bringing a compositional element to his playing that added strikingly colorful energies to “Straight, No Chaser” and four originals by the horn players.