Pianist Pasqua Leads Worthy Tribute to Byard

Jaki Byard is a familiar name to only the most avid of jazz fans. So it’s no surprise that a tribute in his honor on Sunday night at the Jazz Bakery, organized by a former student, pianist Alan Pasqua, drew only a modest audience.

The size of the crowd symbolized the manner in which Byard, despite enormous musical accomplishments as a pianist and composer, was recognized throughout his lifetime. Never widely known, even within the jazz audience, he was revered by all the musicians who came in contact with him. And the still unsolved shooting that killed him in his home in Queens, N.Y., in early February at the age of 76, deprived the jazz world of one of its most gifted artists.

Pasqua, leading a group that included saxophonist Tom Scott, drummer Harvey Mason and another former Byard associate, bassist Richard Reid, devoted virtually the entire program to Byard compositions. Some of the titles alone--”Bird’s Mother, or Mrs. Parker of K.C.” (appropriately a bebop tune), “One Note to My Wife” (essentially a single-note melody) and “Just Rollin’ Along”--reflected the good-natured wit and humor that were essential to Byard’s character. And, despite the fact that the players were reading most of the lines, the subtlety and the depth of the music were readily apparent.

Pasqua’s recognizability factor is also relatively low. And that’s a shame because, like Byard, he is a brilliant talent. His solos--the high points of the program--were filled with lean, improvised melodies that frequently spun unexpectedly across bar lines, momentarily turning the rhythm around before suddenly bringing everything back into sync.

He often followed Byard’s pattern of dipping into the stream of jazz history, tossing in some stride piano, adding some rhapsodic, Tatum-esque chords and Shearing-like block harmonies and pulling it all together with driving bop rhythms. Also like Byard, he did so without tsounding helter-skelter, instead finding the common stylistic.

Reid and Mason, working as a superb rhythm team, provided solid support, with the latter serving up several of his characteristically musical drum solos. And Scott, playing alto saxophone (and soprano on one or two numbers), did a yeoman-like job on some of the difficult Byard bop lines.

Proceedings from the program were donated to the Jaki Byard Scholarship Fund at the New England Conservatory, where he taught for several years. Contributions can be made to the fund at the New England Conservatory, 290 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02115.