Not Only Jazz but Spirit From Flute

Taking the stage in a bright blue choir robe, flutist James Newton made no secret that he intended to turn Saturday’s event at the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s intimate Founders Hall into something of a revival meeting.

“If you take the spiritual out of jazz,” he warned the audience, “you have no jazz.”

That introduction to the traditional “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” coupled with that blazing robe, set the tone for the rest of Newton’s performance on the second night of his two-night run. With his quartet, his was a reverent presentation that found the music of Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and others treated as sacrament, played with the kind of piety and sense of celebration that marks the most joyous church services.

Newton, a professor of music at UC Irvine with a worldwide reputation as a jazz and classical composer and flutist, has always approached his craft with utmost reverence. Winner of Downbeat magazine’s international critics poll as top jazz flutist 18 years running, Newton has released a host of ambitious albums since the late ‘70s on European and domestic labels that make him difficult to categorize.

No stranger to the music of Ellington, his 1985 Blue Note collection of Ellington-Strayhorn arrangements, “The African Flower,” topped a number of jazz polls the following year and is an almost automatic choice in lists of the most important jazz albums of that decade. Here, he looked to Ellington’s spiritual side with “Come Sunday,” the rarely heard “Virgin Jungle” and other of the composer’s more sacred pieces to inspire his sidemen and the audience.

While the flute, without the muscle of saxophones or the brassiness of trumpets, may seem an unlikely jazz instrument, it assumes a new personality in Newton’s hands. Using awe-inspiring technique, amazing breath control and vocalizations (singing in harmony or unison with the instrument), Newton overcame the flute’s demure reputation, making it gutsy, assertive and capable of infinite colors.

Each of his improvisations contained phrases of crystalline purity and knife-sharp overtones. At times, the flute tones balanced precariously on the edge of his voice before falling away quickly like a toboggan on a snowy slope. Other moments found the flute holding secure as his voice did the wandering.

Nowhere was the meatiness of Newton’s tone more apparent than on “Black and Tan Fantasy,” resonant in the lower register, almost piercing at the top. The piece that Ellington dubbed a “gutbucket bolero,” as Newton told the audience, also served as a showcase for bassist Roberto Miranda, the UCLA jazz instructor and longtime associate of the late pianist Horace Tapscott. Miranda’s every solo was a gymnastic display of pluck and strum.

As always, Newton surrounds himself with only the best musicians. Pianist Kei Akagi--the former Miles Davis, Stanley Turrentine and Al DiMeola sideman who also teaches at UC Irvine--provided cool contrast to Newton’s heated play, developing a considered, richly harmonic improvisation on “Motherless Child” while playing with bluesy abandon on Milt Jackson’s “Bag’s Groove.” Drummer Sonship Theus, like Akagi a longtime Newton associate, brought a measure of color to his percussion play, creating an almost hypnotic effect with mallets on “Virgin Jungle,” working a variety of pitches using a tom-tom he controlled with a foot pedal.

That the four men were well familiar with each other was apparent from the seamlessness of their play.

Newton turned even the in-the-pocket mood of “Bag’s Groove” into a religious experience, creating swirled phrases as well as feverish huffing and puffing strong enough to blow your house down. In Newton’s hands, the flute becomes an instrument of command and incantation.

The Performing Arts Center should be complimented for not shying away from the ambitious, out-of-the-mainstream flutist, an internationally known talent based in its backyard.