JAZZ REVIEW : Vintage Duke, Updated Benny at the Bowl

The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which attracted 13,910 listeners to the Hollywood Bowl Wednesday, is a repertory group that drew, for this occasion, on the works of Duke Ellington.

To Mercer Ellington, who still leads the orchestra he inherited from his father in 1974, it must seem ironic that another band is going around reviving the works originated by the Duke.

In fairness it should be said, first, that the Lincoln Center band, conducted by David Berger and with Wynton Marsalis as musical director, does a superb job of replicating these gems. Second, the band includes several sidemen who worked for Duke or Mercer: Britt Woodman on trombone, Norris Turney and Joe Temperley on saxes. Third, the repertory takes in many pieces Mercer never plays.

Most spectacular was the climactic “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” a 15-minute blues elaboration that was decades ahead of its time in 1938, and which provided Duke with his comeback at Newport in 1956, thanks to an electrifying tenor sax solo by Paul Gonsalves. Todd Williams had the unenviable task of building up the same head of steam as Gonsalves. If he didn’t quite make it, the effort was noble and the reaction powerful. But above all, this is a masterpiece of orchestration. The same can be said of “Daybreak Express,” “Ko Ko” and “Black and Tan Fantasy.”

Trumpeter Marsalis offered a convincing “Portrait of Louis Armstrong,” an excerpt from Duke’s “New Orleans Suite,” and Turney went through his elegant Johnny Hodges motions on “Jeep’s Blues.”

Reliving the past was not the objective of the Eddie Daniels-Gary Burton Quintet. Though the recordings of Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton were their points of departure, every tune was updated through ingenious new routines, the phenomenal clarinet work of Daniels, and Burton’s impeccable vibes solos. To point out how far they’ve taken their instruments beyond the peaks of yesteryear is not a derogation of the genius of Goodman and Hampton. Similarly, Makoto Ozone at the piano reflected the values of 1992.

Singer-pianist Nina Simone went through her familiar routines, among them a lyric on “I Don’t Want Him” guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of any feminist. Her “Mood Indigo” underwent a change from major to minor key and suffered from a stiff, unswinging piano solo. Too often Simone’s voice becomes an almost toneless shout, yet she is capable of tenderness. Her best moment came with an adaptation of a touching poem, “Images,” which she said was written 100 years ago.