Wallace Roney Quintet Jump-Starts Creative Set

Trumpeter Wallace Roney’s continuing quest to establish a visible musical presence of his own continued Thursday at Catalina Bar & Grill in the opening set of a four-night run.

An early immersion in the music of Miles Davis--and, in fact, a classic performance with Davis in the ‘80s at the Montreux jazz festival in a re-creation of some of the classic Davis-Gil Evans works--tended to obscure Roney’s own abilities for a much-too-long period in his early career. What became apparent in his playing on Thursday night, however, was the fact that--like the linkage between alto saxophonist Sonny Stitt and Charlie Parker--Roney’s playing may be inextricably tied to Davis, but that doesn’t necessarily diminish its creative powers.

Working with most of the players present on his fine new recording, “No Room for Argument,” he delivered a program filled with the sort of urgent, hard-driving energy not always heard in a band’s opening night set.

Promising to start out with something familiar to get “warmed up,” he kicked off a free-floating medley that ranged from Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser” and Parker’s “Now’s the Time” to the Rodgers and Hart standard, “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.”

Roney’s soloing was filled with colorful shifts of timbre and style. Occasionally playing with Davis-style lyricism, his Harmon-muted trumpet aimed directly into the microphone, he quickly shifted into open-horn runs, moving through strings of rapid-paced bebop licks alternating with sudden bursts into his top register.

His front-line mate, brother Antoine Roney, was an ideal companion, his dark-toned tenor saxophone and busy-fingered soprano saxophone providing both counterpoint and companionship for Roney’s trumpet.

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The rhythm section--regular associates Buster Williams (bass) and Lenny White (drums), with the added keyboard work of Billy Childs--shifted intuitively through the changing rhythms. White’s surging percussion, still not quite adapted to the size of the room, nonetheless propelled the solos forward in tsunami waves of sound. And Childs, winging his way through his first performance with the quintet, was--as always--a master of musical adaptiveness, soloing with style, and contributing invaluable compositional-like devices to the ensembles.

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* The Wallace Roney Quintet at Catalina Bar & Grill, 1640 N. Cahuenga Blvd. Tonight at 8:30 p.m. and Sunday at 7:30 p.m., $20 cover. Tonight at 10:30 p.m. and Sunday at 9:30 p.m., $17 cover. Two-drink minimum. (323) 466-2210.