JAZZ REVIEW : LaVerne Quartet: Who’s in Charge?

Andy LaVerne, the pianist-composer whose quartet opened Tuesday at Catalina, has shown his versatility in a career that has encompassed jazz-rock, free-jazz, and even writing a symphony for Stan Getz, with whom he toured in the 1970s.

His present group, at the club through Sunday, displays LaVerne’s skill as a writer and his technical adroitness at the keyboard, yet his moments of true inspiration were infrequent, or were possibly just inaudible due to the sometimes explosive drumming of Vinnie Colaiuta .

Much of the time Bob Sheppard seemed to be the leader. Playing tenor saxophone and doubling briefly on soprano, he evidenced a power that gave almost every composition a fuller identity. Jimmy Haslip, playing electric bass, showed comparable command, particularly in his solos, which achieved a guitar-like fluency.

After playing a tune based on the chords of “Like Someone in Love,” which he described as “the wrong tune with the right changes,” LaVerne announced that he would now turn things around by playing the right tune--Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays”--with the wrong changes. This was an understatement: The group’s fortissimo treatment of the song turned both melody and harmony every which way but right. Was this an adventurous experiment or a tasteless travesty? Perhaps it depends how much respect one has for Kern’s beautiful melody.