The Mayhew Quartet Adds Some Welcome Dimension

The brass ceiling in jazz has thinned a bit in recent years. It’s no longer as surprising as it once was to see ensembles that include female musicians playing horns, and playing them well. But it’s still a relative rarity, and employment opportunities for female artists are no better--they may even be worse--than they are for male players.

All of which made it unusual to hear an ensemble such as the Virginia Mayhew Quartet--in which the majority of the members were women, including saxophonist Mayhew, drummer Allison Miller and pianist Roberta Picket, with bassist Gary Wang the lone male participant--appearing at the Jazz Lobby in the Westin Airport Hotel.

Unusual, that is, not on the basis of skills, but on the basis of the fact that it happens so rarely (bassist Jennifer York’s band is one of the few Southland female jazz ensembles).

OK, at this point the political-correctness police are undoubtedly stepping up to say that jazz should be both color-blind and gender-blind. That’s an admirable, if too rarely fulfilled, desire. But there’s another element, and that’s the obvious fact that both methodology and standards of achievement in jazz have largely been set by male instrumentalists and composers. And, while hearing players such as Mayhew, there’s the tendency to evaluate based upon those long-established standards while, at the same time, hoping--perhaps quixotically--for a willingness to allow an interpretive range to enter the music that reaches beyond the parameters of masculine experience.

There were times during the Mayhew quartet’s performance when the music seemed straight out of the jazz mainstream--especially during Mayhew’s confident, even aggressively muscular, tenor saxophone playing, delivered with a powerful rhythmic drive and first-rate technical facility (effectively improvising in 5/4 during her own “Monterey Blues”). Pianist Picket’s lush, cluster-based chording made an added connection with jazz as we know it.

But the more intriguing moments of the set traced to Mayhew’s soprano saxophone playing on Kenny Barron’s “Mythology,” a distinct variation from her work on tenor, delivered with an unabashedly warm tone and an expressive gift for melodic invention. Best of all, Miller’s drumming was the perfect composite--brawny and swinging where high-voltage propulsion was the appropriate choice, infinitely subtle with accents and timbres where sound and texture were demanded.

And it was in those passages that the brass ceiling thinned even more, at times becoming transparent enough to allow the view of a jazz environment in which gender and color-blindness become irrelevant, replaced by a willingness to celebrate and embrace diversity of every kind.