JAZZ REVIEW : Structure, Improvisation From Blanchard

Terence Blanchard has a full plate these days. His sixth album for Columbia has just been released, he has written another Spike Lee film score, this time for the director’s upcoming feature “Clockers,” and he is busily touring internationally with his quartet.

Not bad for a 33-year-old jazz trumpeter in an era when talented young players seem to be emerging almost every month. But, as he made clear in the opening set of a five-night run before a medium-sized crowd at the Jazz Bakery on Tuesday, Blanchard brings a strikingly mature perspective to his music--a perspective that uses carefully structured compositional schemes as the basis for stretched-out improvisations.

Most of the pieces he played were from his new “Romantic Defiance” CD. Often, they began with complex, but intriguing metric ambiguities and mysterious harmonic densities. Long solos from Blanchard and talented pianist Edward Simon were laid across mesmerizing rhythmic vamps and contrapuntal riffing. The resulting sounds often had the gripping, emotionally entrancing qualities of trance music.

Blanchard has developed into a powerful, brilliantly controlled trumpeter. His improvisations were dominated by stratospheric high notes, blistering runs and impulsive bursts of sound. At times, his choruses seemed abstract to the point of disconnectedness. At other times, the various disjunct elements he kept tossing into the picture suddenly came into focus.

By the set’s conclusion, Blanchard had effectively demonstrated that he is a player who fully intends to have an impact upon contemporary jazz. If Wynton Marsalis is the Dizzy Gillespie of the ‘90s, laying down the musical dialectic for the decade, then Blanchard may well be its Fats Navarro or its Kenny Dorham, modifying and augmenting that same vocabulary to tell his own unique stories.

* The Terence Blanchard Quartet, with Ed Simon, piano; David Pulphus, bass, and Troy Davis, drums, at the Jazz Bakery, 3233 Helms Ave., (310) 271-9039. Through Saturday. $20 admission. Blanchard performs one show, at 8:30 p.m.