JAZZ REVIEW : While the Lion King Headlines, Another Cat’s Growl Impresses

Sleek, subtle and dangerous.

It’s the best way to describe pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, the most surprising of the trio of artists who prowled the stage for the Young Lions jazz concert at the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday night.

In a local performance last year, Cuban expatriate Rubalcaba walked with the crashing gait of a grizzly rather than the alert tread of a jaguar. His voracious technique was on full display via great gulps of pianistics, and he appeared to have little interest in anything except the musical chase.

Not so this time around. Perhaps because he was working with the wonderful rhythm team of Ron Carter, bass, and Lewis Nash, drums, Rubalcaba sounded like an artist transformed. Devoting himself to a program consisting of a few ballads and a set of be-bop chestnuts--”Hot House,” “Woody ‘n’ You” and “Ah-Leu Cha” among them--he suddenly revealed a graceful musical sensitivity to match his unquestioned virtuosity at the keyboard.

How effective was Rubalcaba? Coming on stage at 7:30, smack in the middle of what is very much the noisy dining and social hour at the Bowl, it took him no more than 15 minutes to recast the venue into fully attentive serenity. And he did so with a perilously slow ballad, filled with mesmerizing open spaces. Working in tandem with Carter’s perfectly positioned counterlines, Rubalcaba brilliantly underscored the essential truth of music as a carefully balanced combination of sounds and silences.

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There was little similar balance in the music of the program’s second Young Lion, tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, who is still a bit too unformed to be either sleek or subtle.

At the moment, the talented young player seems poised on the edge of an identity crisis. His solo on an initial blues, for example, energized by honks and repetitive riffing, could easily have been played at a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in 1951. And many of his other choruses appeared to be shaped by an emotionally ascending drive to rouse the audience rather than by any internal sense of musical spontaneity.

But there’s no questioning his skills. Redman is quickly becoming a master of his instrument and, when he elects to do so, he can run with the fiercest players in jazz. His improvising on an original tune, “The Deserving Many,” demonstrated why he has been identified by some observers as the next important jazz saxophonist. Before that can happen, however, he’ll have to discover whether he wants to be Illinois Jacquet, Sonny Rollins or--hopefully--Joshua Redman.

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The third Young Lion might better be characterized as the original Young Lion. If anyone can take credit for the current return to jazz basics, with its corollary triggering of a generation of bristling new players, it is trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.

He placed his firm stamp upon the continuing value of those jazz basics by starting his portion of the program with a spectacular trumpet solo he called “The Legend of Buddy Bolden”--a bright, brassy cry to the heavens that at times had the feel of a musical channeling of New Orleans’ legendary trumpeter.

But Marsalis’ primary focus for this evening was compositional, not instrumental. The remainder of his set was dedicated to the 10 movements of “Master of Melancholy,” an original ballet suite for a 13-piece ensemble.

With segment titles that ranged from “Boogie Woogie Stomp” and “Slow Drag” to “Bebop” and “Root Groove,” the work was yet another aspect of Marsalis’ belief in the still-rich, still-unexhausted lode of possibilities in classic jazz forms.

But he did not stop there. By adding movements labeled “Habanera” and “Gagaku,” he opened up the tradition to streams of creative currents from other areas. And, in “Gagaku,” in particular, the result was an enchanting blend--tinged with tonal slips and slides--of jazz and Japanese music.

At this level of his development as a composer, Marsalis possesses an engaging mix of Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington influences in his use of instrumental timbres. But he never applies these influences from a period point of view alone. What emerged, instead, was music for a thoroughly contemporary-sounding large jazz ensemble--blessed with such excellent soloists as trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, trumpeters Marcus Printup and Ryan Kisor, saxophonist Wessell Anderson and pianist Eric Reed--whose roots are firmly embedded in the elemental sources of jazz.

Curiously, the audience seemed more entertained by Marsalis’ descriptive comments than it was by the music itself. And, by the eight or ninth movement, many in the crowd of 11,058 were beginning to head for the exits.

Nonetheless, “Master of Melancholy” was, in sum, an impressive presentation of Marsalis’ expanding talents. Clearly, it’s a safe bet that he--along with Rubalcaba and, perhaps, Redman--is a lion whose roar will continue to be heard