Jazz : Brackeen Needs Push to Break Out

Joanne Brackeen does what she does so well that it seems brutish to suggest that she should be doing something else.

Her performance at the Jazz Bakery on Friday was a brilliant display of contemporary power piano.

Much of what she played--especially in originals such as “Picasso”--leaned in the direction of contemporary concert music, often with great effectiveness. Her jazz-oriented material--”Just in Time,” “I Hear a Rhapsody” and “Just One of Those Things”--pulsed with rhythmic complexities and harmonic densities reminiscent of her principal influences, McCoy Tyner and Chick Corea.

What was missing was a sense of openness and space, an opportunity for the music to break through all the virtuosic pyrotechnics.

Occasionally, and almost always too briefly (“The Island” was a good example), Brackeen demonstrated the ability to spin out a lyrical line with sensitivity and feeling.

More often, she seemed determined to explore the piano’s potential for orchestral sound masses--not an intrinsically bad idea, had she also explored the instrument’s capacity for gentler timbres.

An obviously gifted improviser and an innovative composer, Brackeen would be a far more convincing artist if she could expand her creative vision beyond the hard and fast primary colorations that dominate so much of her current work.