Verizon Music Festival Adds Dance to the Mix

The 2001 Verizon Music Festival took a turn in a somewhat different direction Monday night at the Wilshire Theatre. Adding a new component to the series’ already expansive collection of artists, the program featured a jazz and dance collaboration between pianist McCoy Tyner and the Lula Washington Dance Theatre.

Jazz and modern dance have always appeared to be potentially compatible partners. Both are products of the rich creativity of 20th century American culture, both rely upon continuous revitalization from urban, folk and pop sources, and both are linked (in one way or another) to the spirit of improvisation. But joint ventures have not always been as successful as one might expect, in part because of the difficulty of coordinating contrasting approaches to the improvisational process.

Tyner, leading a five-piece ensemble that also featured flutist Dave Valentin, took a pragmatic approach in the music he conceived for a series of segments performed by the Washington dancers.

By emphasizing sequenced musical structures rather than thematic content, laying down repetitious vamp patterns, allowing improvisation within the structures, Tyne provided convincing rhythmic support for the dancers while allowing a liberal amount of jazz improvising by the musicians.

The segments emerged as a series of tableaux relying primarily upon solo and duo presentations, often linked to individual improvisations by Tyner and his players. The results were consistently compelling, perhaps because the methodology was so uncomplicated, allowing ample opportunity for individual expression and creative dance-music linkage.

And it was appropriate that the climactic and most effective episode was one--presumably added, or modified, after Sept. 11--in which a trio of dancers offered a dramatic metaphor of the horrified reactions triggered by the World Trade Center attack, accompanied by Tyner’s intensely charged musical counterpoint.

In the opening half of the program, jazz singer Jane Monheit offered further confirmation of her rapidly growing skills. Emphasizing material from her current album, “Come Dream With Me,” she demonstrated considerably more improvisational freedom than was present as recently as last June, during a weeklong run at Catalina Bar & Grill.

Moving fluidly through the melodies of songs such as “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” “Never Let Me Go” and “More Than You Know,” she sang with the soaring rhythmic freedom and harmonic imaginativeness of an instrumentalist.

And when she closed her set, as she often does, with a stunning rendition of “Over the Rainbow,” she affirmed that her interpretive abilities--her capacity to tell a story with her songs--are every bit the equal of her extraordinary musicality.

The Jeff Babko group, the Emerging Talent ensemble on the bill, opened the evening with a set dominated by high-voltage sounds and turbulent rhythms.