Promising Delegation Finding Its Footing

When do young jazz players make the tricky move from craft-like performance to creative expression, from simulating their favorite influences to revealing their own musical identities?

The passage point is always uncertain, but in the case of the Jazz Delegation From the West, one of the Southland’s most talented young ensembles, the transition is now very much in process. Starting out as the Jazz Alliance (a name conflict with another organization forced the change), the band members--Donald Vega, piano; Zane Musa, tenor saxophone; Shanti Mathews, guitar; Danton Boller, bass, and Willie Jones III, drums--are beginning to discover the shape of their own identities.

They also are learning that self-discovery can be an uneven process. In a concert at Pedrini Music in Alhambra, the Delegation’s playing ran the gamut from splendid to ordinary, a predictable range of performance from an emerging group of talented young artists. Fortunately, when the Delegation players were good, they were very good, indeed.

Most of the original tunes were penned by Vega, 22, a gifted young Nicaraguan musician whose illegal immigration status has placed him in jeopardy of being deported from the U.S. (His attorney revealed on Saturday that Vega’s case will finally be reviewed by an INS judge in mid-May.) Vega’s works, like his piano soloing, revealed a talent rooted in tradition, but with a uniquely fascinating bent of its own that bodes extremely well for his future.

Musa, at 18 the band’s youngest member, revealed virtuosic technical skills, moving all around the horn with ease. If he still needs to find the patience to reach past the technique to find both the sounds and the silences of the improvisational art, he has plenty of time to do so.

Mathews, who graduated from USC in 1995 with a master’s in music, was a solid contributor on every count: his accompaniments were filled with rich, textured chording, and his soloing was consistently fleet and fascinating. Boller, 23, recovering from an accident, played only a few tunes, but gave a brief, telling glimpse of his skills in an extraordinary set of blues choruses. And Jones, at 28 the band’s senior player (and also a member of the band Black/Note), laid down his familiar, dependable flow of swinging rhythm.

The overflow audience at Pedrini’s--an Alhambra music store that opens its performance room for free concerts every Saturday afternoon--loved every minute of the performance. Ironically, most of the crowd seemed old enough to serve as parents or grandparents for the Jazz Delegation members. But the polarity was intriguing, a kind of happy meeting ground between the revival of interest in jazz on the part of young musicians and the eager, continuing support of the music’s longtime fans.