Williams Helps Bring Upbeat Tone to Bowl

The Hollywood Bowl’s last major jazz event of the season was--even before it began--a roller coaster of ups and downs. The initially scheduled program had all the makings of a celebration, with original headliner Mel Torme making his 20th consecutive annual appearance at the Bowl. But the stroke Torme suffered in early August removed him from the lineup, casting somewhat of a pall over the event.

Matters took a decided upswing with the announcement that Joe Williams would replace Torme. And, predictably, the veteran singer’s appearance provided an otherwise mercurial evening with its most outstanding performance. Sounding in fine form, the veteran singer dipped into his blues bag for romping, hard-swinging, good-fun renderings of “Get Out My Life, Woman” and “Who She Do.” Then, as he has done increasingly in recent years, Williams demonstrated his extraordinary sensitivity as a jazz ballad singer with gorgeous readings of tunes such as “Tenderly” and “Summertime.”

“These are the kind of songs,” he noted, with a touch of insightful whimsy, “that take us back to the good old days before making love became germ warfare.”

Williams has become such a masterful artist that he was able, at one point, to respond to an unexpectedly raspy high note by instantly transforming it into an element in a passionately climactic passage. It was a stunning example of the spontaneous creativity of jazz singing at its finest. No one, at the moment, is doing it any better than Williams, and Torme--a Williams fan--was well served by his sterling replacement.

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The evening had begun on an energetic up note. The opening segment, “Trumpet Madness,” was a joyous, intergenerational encounter between a raft of trumpeters ranging from veteran performers such as Doc Cheatham and Clark Terry to young lions Roy Hargrove and Terence Blanchard. If there were moments of procedural confusion--understandable in a kind of jam session format--there were no generational inconsistencies. The language of jazz spoken by performers five decades apart in age was a smooth, consistent, understandable dialect that each player understood well. As the looks of admiration passed back and forth, the friendly musical rivalry among players was clearly as much fun for the musicians as it was for the responsive, medium-sized crowd.

But the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, conducted by Jon Faddis, took the proceedings in a less elevated direction. The set started well with an arrangement by trombonist-composer Slide Hampton of the Count Basie classic, “Shiny Stockings.” With it, the band did what it has done well, in performance and on recordings--offer a stimulating, often enlightening reexamination of a classic big-band jazz selection.

A lengthy series of pieces titled “Legacy of Miles,” however, “conceived, arranged and conducted” by Garnett Brown (also a trombonist and composer), slowed the evening’s momentum to a crawl. Brown’s compositions were thoughtful and well-crafted, although the sloppiness with which many segments were performed suggested that rehearsal opportunities may have been less than optimal. And the individual sections, except for a number in which trumpeter Lew Soloff played a Davis-like solo against a Gil Evans-like backdrop, only rarely recalled the essential emotions of Davis’ art.