Burton and Ozone Unite for a Joyful, Far-Reaching Recital

Vibraphonist Gary Burton has had a long history of duo performances and recordings. His numerous partners have included Chick Corea, Steve Swallow, Ralph Towner and Paul Bley. But his pairings with Japanese pianist Makoto Ozone--dating to the mid-’80s--are probably his most effective mano a mano musical partnerships.

Sunday afternoon, in a rare Southland appearance, Burton and Ozone teamed up for a superlative jazz recital at Pasadena’s Shumei Hall. Although they have performed together frequently over the last decade and a half, the symbiotic musical connectiveness between the pair transcended creative familiarity. Far more important was that they share common approaches to improvisation.

Each is fully capable of playing with great lyrical sensitivity; each is just as likely to rip off rhythmically propulsive, emotionally dense musical passages. And, equally important, each possesses a thorough familiarity with the stylistic eras of jazz history.

Their program was a generous, far-reaching collection of material. Standards surfaced in the form of pieces such as “Beautiful Dreamer”; a pair of melodically attractive Ozone tunes, “Bento Box” and “Times Like These,” were displayed; Chick Corea was represented with “Bud Powell” and “Brasilia”; and Latin America was celebrated via Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “O Grande Amor” (dating from Burton’s tenure with the Stan Getz Quartet) and Astor Piazzolla’s “Laura’s Dream” (actually written for Burton).

The playing was a joy to hear: jazz improvisation driven by musical intelligence, delivered with utmost clarity, underscored with subtle, implied swing.

Burton’s four-mallet style is admirable for its technical virtuosity, but the real test is what he produces with it. And what he offered here was a series of solos in which he used two mallets to create horn-like, bop-tinged lines, accenting and underscoring them with explosive bursts of four-mallet chording--all of it done with elegant musicality.

Ozone, aside from this superb interaction with Burton, came close to stealing the performance with his consistently fascinating solos. On “Bud Powell,” for example, he wittily chose to solo well beyond the boundaries of bebop, tossing in references to Thelonious Monk and Fats Waller as well. And on “O Grande Amor,” he constructed a solo with a beginning, a middle and an end, a virtual composition in itself.

Burton and Ozone were joined for the final few numbers by several of Burton’s former students from the Berklee College of Music: drummer Gerry Kalaf, bassist Eric Stiller and the once highly regarded alto saxophonist Christopher Hollyday, who in recent years has maintained a relatively low profile, living in San Diego.