A Wonderful Tribute From Dizzy’s Deans

“Dizzy: The Man and The Music” seems an awfully expansive title for a show that lasts little more than an hour and features just four musicians.

After all, volumes have been written about the impact on the art and craft of jazz by trumpeter, composer and bandleader John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, who died four years ago this month.

But the quartet playing under that umbrella Friday for the first of a two-night stand at the Orange County Performing Arts Center succeeded in creating a strong sense of the late bebop innovator’s spirit with only half a dozen selections.

The group was led by bassist and longtime Gillespie associate John Lee, and like its namesake, played smartly and with purpose while imparting the same sense of fun and humor that Gillespie brought to the bandstand each time he played.

A large measure of this spirit came from trumpeter and Gillespie protege Jon Faddis, who introduced the tunes, took a few comic turns and played with Gillespie’s trademark sense of drama.

Faddis, who has assimilated much of the honoree’s style, marked his play with long, slightly smeared, Gillespie-like phrases and sudden, attention-grabbing shifts of pitch and volume. He also brought a sense of Gillespie’s playfulness to the bandstand, joking between numbers. At one point, he even serenaded a drowsy child in the audience with an impromptu lullaby.

Matching Faddis’ strong musical performance was pianist Cyrus Chestnut, whose strongly lyrical solo on “Birks Works” contrasted nicely with Faddis’ more frantic play. The two were of a single mind on Thelonious Monk’s “ ‘Round Midnight,” as Chestnut echoed a series of muted trumpet coos with his own spare, highly polished lament.

Lee’s use of electric bass helped the group avoid a retro sound. His solos--sprinkled with double stops, thumb funk and ringing, upper register tones--often gave the tunes a decidedly modern feel.

Cuban-born drummer Ignacio Berroa, a mainstay of Gillespie’s United Nations Orchestra, likewise added contemporary spice to the music, especially on Afro-Cuban numbers he propelled with polyrhythmic accents and galloping tom-tom passages.

The quartet gave a representative, if brief, overview of works written by or associated with Gillespie. They opened with “Woody ‘n’ You,” which Faddis explained was written by Gillespie for Woody Herman.

On that number, the trumpeter wasted no time ascending into a stratospheric register, hitting notes so high they sounded like whistles. On the bop-paced “Oop-Pop-A-Dah” the trumpeter sang, scatting briskly with little regard to pitch, while managing to hit some high vocal tones that sounded as if they were played on the trumpet.

The group gave a nod to Gillespie’s Afro-Cuban innovations with “Fiesta Mojo,” a Caribbean-influenced number and the only piece in the set that wasn’t from the composer’s fertile 1940s period. They closed with Gillespie’s best-known number, “Night in Tunisia,” played at a tempo that brought out the quick-thinking abilities of Faddis and the drumming of Berroa.

Or did it? Faddis, promising another tune, conferred at length with Chestnut, then spent a long time counting down a tune that consisted of one brief, bright note. It was the only bit of performance high jinks that fell flat, leaving audience members with the feeling that they’d been cheated out of another tune. But this kind of off-center teasing was vintage Gillespie.

It’s doubtful that this program would have succeeded as well had it been presented in the 3,000-seat Segerstrom Hall rather than as part of the new Jazz Club at the Center series in the smaller Founders Hall. The intimacy of the 230-seat jazz club setup let Faddis and company get up close and personal with the audience, something Gillespie himself always managed to do. The sound, without the rolling reverberation of the larger hall or the lack of clarity found in many clubs, was excellent.

* The Orange County Performing Arts Center’s Jazz Club at the Center series concludes with saxophonist Joe Lovano’s quartet Feb. 21-22. (714) 556-2787.