Violinist Frigo Offers an Adventurous Show

The jazz violin seems to be on a rampage lately. Last month, the talented Regina Carter made an impressive debut at the Jazz Bakery. Last weekend, the Turtle Island Quartet demonstrated the viability of jazz on the violin, viola and cello as well as within the traditionally classically oriented string quartet instrumentation.

But on Monday night, it remained for the far too little acknowledged Johnny Frigo to demonstrate how good the violin can sound in the hands of an immensely gifted and richly experienced artist.

Although Frigo, 82, has spent most of his career playing string bass in Chicago recording studios, he is also an uncommonly articulate violinist whose late emergence--he has really been active on the instrument only since the late ‘80s--has in no way diminished the high quality of his work.

Combining a visiting jazz star with an unfamiliar local rhythm section can be a disastrous enterprise. But not this time. Frigo, working with the talented veteran trio of pianist Frank Collette, bassist Jim Hughart and drummer Harold Jones, simply took a spontaneous approach. Sticking mostly to standards, with a few arrangements from his latest album thrown in for good measure, he humorously kept the moderate sized but enthusiastic crowd informed about the proceedings.

On “My Romance,” for example, he played a few choruses, then suddenly turned to the trio, said, “In E flat,” and did an instant modulation. For the next number, Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood,” Frigo announced, in front, that there would be a cadenza at the beginning and the end, at which point the trio should rejoin him after he “goes real high until my nose starts bleeding.”

Black humor aside, the piece was rendered beautifully, warm and intimate in the melodic passages, filled with imagination in the floating improvised sections and appropriately theatrical in the final super-high-note cadenza.

In the closing moments of his set, Frigo did something rarely seen in a jazz program: He asked for requests from the audience. The result was a series of quick takes on tunes such as “Sophisticated Lady” and “I’ll Remember April.” When “All the Things You Are” and “Smile” were called out simultaneously, he simply combined the two into an unlikely medley.

The only regret about the performance--a performance offering convincing evidence that jazz can be humorous, entertaining, swinging and adventurous all at the same time--was that it was the first night of only a two-night run. Frigo deserves a quick return engagement, one that will last long enough to give a larger audience the opportunity to hear this remarkable jazz veteran.