Trible Adds Spiritual Spark to His Singing

Calling Dwight Trible a jazz singer doesn’t quite grasp what his music is all about. Closely associated with the streams of creative energy that flowed from Horace Tapscott, Trible might better be described as a jazz griot, even a jazz shaman.

When he came on stage at the Jazz Bakery Thursday for a too-brief one-nighter, it immediately became clear that the performance would be underscored with a floating sense of spirituality. From the first trance-like rhythms of the opening number, Trible’s vocal passages lifted above the music, hovering and soaring through sound and pulse. He didn’t scat, he didn’t sing standards, he didn’t offer the sort of briskly articulated rhythmic phrasing one usually associates with jazz singing.

But when Trible offered “Naima” and his own version of “A Love Supreme,” a different view of jazz began to materialize, one enhanced by connections not only with Tapscott but also with John Coltrane’s later work. And when he climaxed his set with a passionate rendering of Tapscott’s “Mother Ship,” he seemed to transport the entire room, with its moderate-sized crowd, into a place of boundless emotional intensity.

Trible’s vocal style involves opening his mouth widely to utter long phrases, moving from high falsetto to thick, mysterious chest tones. There was one point, in “Mother Ship,” when he uttered a loud, ecstatic shout with such zeal that it must have left audio registration marks upon the Bakery’s walls. He is, by any measure, a true original.

Trible’s musical companion in the front line of his accompanying quartet was tenor saxophonist Charles Owens, also a Tapscott associate. Like Trible, Owens soloed with a fervor that reached beyond jazz and into the realm of transformative preaching.

Working together, they offered a potent reminder that jazz exists in a creative universe unrestricted by the narrow demands of the commercial marketplace.