Byrd Aims for Ballanchine Heights, but Hectic ‘Jazz Train’ Derails

If he ever dared dramatize it, Donald Byrd’s choreographic obsession with the late George Balanchine could make a revealing story ballet--more revealing, certainly, than anything his company has brought to the Southland recently. Not only do Byrd’s works teem with Balanchine ideas and references, but his last few projects seem conceived as attempts to create African American equivalents of vintage Balanchine masterworks.

Starting with its title, Byrd’s “Harlem Nutcracker” announced these intentions forthrightly enough, and the plotless, three-part, full-evening “Jazz Train,” which arrived at El Camino College on Friday, seems pretty transparently modeled on Balanchine’s “Jewels,” though a Byrd program note focuses on much bigger game.

“I want ‘Jazz Train’ to be like Balanchine’s Stravinsky and Ravel festivals at [New York] City Ballet,” he writes, “going beyond the preconceptions of jazz, extending and experimenting with its range as an art form.” He also calls jazz “truly black music. It is the place where black thinking artists make art that has ideas and that is exploratory.”

Nice words, but if he believes what he’s saying, why is so much of “Jazz Train” both ruinously unmusical and anything but truly black? Working with taped music by Max Roach, Vernon Reid and Geri Allen, he sets an invariably hectic pace whatever the accompaniment, works his fine, 10-member modern dance company to the max but often hamstrings everyone with assumptions about virtuosity and, particularly, partnering that come straight from the City Ballet lexicon.

Nearly every major duet depends on balletic lifts and, particularly, balances-in-extension: the kind of steps created for women in toe shoes and a technical compromise without them. Moreover, like his headlong pace, Byrd’s emphasis on balletic placement and rhetoric clash with scores exploring less formal concepts of grace and elegance.

As a result, “Jazz Train” never remotely achieves the Balanchine/Stravinsky (or even the lesser Balanchine/Ravel) fusion of impetus. Nor can it match the inspiration that Alonzo King has found in the music of Pharoah Sanders and King’s way of making ballet technique perfectly at home with jazz. It may aim to go beyond the preconceptions of jazz, but it doesn’t begin to question the preconceptions of Donald Byrd--nonstop hard-sell allegro as a style, for instance.

In Part 1 (to Roach percussion), the dancers wear black, the stage is smoky and Byrd’s use of finger-snapping as a jazz cliche to be teased and tweaked into new validity punctuates choreography full of intriguing structural gambits and instant switches between the street and the academy--for instance, dancing slouched down versus pulled up. By the end, the contrasting blocks of movement seen earlier have shattered into tiny splinters with the fragments yielding a kaleidoscopic ensemble and then one major showpiece solo after another. Performed at the Alex Theatre earlier this season, this insolently sexy divertissement proves the evening’s highlight.

Part 2 (to Reid trumpet and guitar) finds everyone in loose, lush Grecian drag by Nancy Brous, costumes that get radically briefer in the middle section of the work. Jack Mehler’s Greek columns complete the illusion of antiquity, but the moody, often lyrical score doesn’t suit choreography that ricochets between stylized pseudo-classicism and crude movement jokes. Very ill-conceived in Byrd’s silliest “Harlem Nutcracker” manner.

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The final section (to Allen piano and vocals) resolutely avoids balleticisms in its opening section: a raunchy, propulsive social dance abstraction that sets everyone twitching and quivering madly. For once, even the lifts don’t look balletic--until a flashback or fantasy interlude and the final back-to-the-party duet and ensemble. Here, anything goes, including twitching, ballet, gymnastics, pratfalls, playacting, “Rocka My Soul” prop fans. Anything.

The best moments in “Jazz Train” come from Byrd’s inventive ideas about juxtaposition--making two kinds of movement occur simultaneously and comment on one another. He’s especially exciting when setting a duet or trio on one part of the stage against a group at the back in an unpredictable and often brilliant mesh of styles. But Byrd hasn’t got the gift or guts to be simple; there’s no true adagio dancing on board this train and the two closest attempts (a woman’s solo in Part 2, the big duet in Part 3) fall prey to his worst diversionary instincts.

If most of the time you wish that Byrd would simply forget Balanchine and go his own way, when it comes to lyricism, the conclusion is different: Better to steal it from a master than fake it, speed it up or play it for laughs.