JAZZ REVIEW : Akiyoshi at Home With Big-Band Sound

Billy Strayhorn is often credited with saying that Duke Ellington played the piano but his real instrument was his band. The same can be said of Toshiko Akiyoshi.

The composer-pianist, whose orchestra played Bovard Auditorium on the USC campus Friday, makes her most lasting statements with her pen.

Though her keyboard work is full of Bud Powell-like character, it’s only one ingredient in the grand scope of her music. Akiyoshi’s most impressive achievement, on full view at this performance, is the sweeping, symphonic nature of her compositions; pieces that couple the rhythms of jazz with the tonal colors of the classical impressionists.

As an orchestrator, Akiyoshi has no contemporary peer. Here, trumpet fanfares gave way to vigorous lines from trombones and rhythm section, followed by a translucent blend of bass clarinet, piccolo, soprano saxophone and bass trombone. Shifting lines from four flutes and the bass clarinet were touched by the quiet fingerprints of muted trumpets. Rousing, full-bore passages from the entire orchestra were balanced by Akiyoshi’s understated fills from the piano.

The group’s principal soloist, Lew Tabackin, looked deep into the history of the tenor saxophone, playing with the robust, slightly raunchy tone of Ben Webster on “And Yet Another Tear” in lines that climbed persistently and with little break. An aggressive flutist, Tabackin worked up breathy, virile solos that spilled phrases one upon another in tenacious succession.

Tabackin gave Akiyoshi’s “Autumn Sea” its Japanese flavor, playing his flute in the style of the Japanese wind instrument shakuhachi as drummer Terry Clarke added Eastern touches with his mallets.

None of the orchestra’s other soloists came close to matching Tabackin’s high style and the band’s ensemble play was not as polished as heard on the orchestra’s recent recordings for Columbia.

Still, this was a solid performance of Akiyoshi’s tonally ambitious charts that showed she has few equals among today’s decidedly thin crop of big-band composers.