JAZZ REVIEW : Three-Day Party Less Than Sum of Parts

The Intercity Jazz and Blues Party, a three-night concert series held over the weekend at the Pacifica Hotel in Culver City, was disappointing.

It was poorly attended and poorly planned, with interludes of recorder music, a painfully out-of-tune piano, and two major no-shows (Herman Riley and Wilton Felder) among the listed parade of saxophonists. Those who did show included Red Holloway, Curtis Peagler and Rickey Woodard. It all added up to much less than the sum of the promised parts.

It took a while for Friday’s show to get going, with an electric keyboard, bass and drums providing filler music from a stage at the side of the ballroom. About 80 minutes into the show, Maxine Weldon woke up the audience with some powerful blues-and-ballad belting.

After an irrelevant interlude by Jess Bolero, an actor who did a Cab Calloway impersonation, the Juggernaut band took over, dominating most of the five-hour show.

As drummer Frank Capp pointed out, the room’s cavernous acoustics made it hard for the men to hear one another. His co-leader, Nat Pierce, quickly discovered that the upright piano was a downright disgrace. If the orchestra was not in peak form, these were the chief reasons. Nevertheless, there were moments of discovery. Rickey Woodard, in a tenor sax battle with Gary Herbig, all but blew the roof off in a volatile exchange.

Nolan Smith paid tribute to the late trumpeter Clifford Brown with an impassioned “I Remember Clifford” that ended with a long, suspenseful series of cadenzas.

Much of the band’s time was devoted to accompanying singers. Stephanie Haynes, normally heard with a trio, was in fine voice, aided by the orchestral backing. Ernie Andrews went through his long-familiar Ellington and blues medleys, the latter including Al Hibbler scooped tones and early Eckstine bari-tones.

Linda Hopkins, to whom the evening was dedicated, and Barbara Morrison, the concert’s producer, brought the session to a pandemoniac climax dueting in “Meet Me With Your Black Drawers On.”

Benny Golson, the composer and saxophonist, provided the weekend’s only major surprise with a rare local appearance Sunday. This would have been a golden opportunity to hear him play a carefully planned program of his famous jazz standards, such as “Killer Joe,” “Stable Mates,” “Blues March.” No such luck. He offered only one original (“Along Came Betty”), spent much of the time backing Barbara Morrison’s vocals and wound up in a frenetic blues improvisation backed only by Paul Humphrey’s drums.

Golson’s tenor sax has not merely moved with the times, it’s leaped ahead of them. He scarcely resembles the hard-bop soloist of his Art Blakey days. It will be a pleasure to hear him under the right conditions.