Film Composer Altman Makes the Spazio Scene

The film composer’s role is an enigmatic one: Provide music strong and atmospheric enough to capture a viewer’s emotions while supporting, rather than distracting from, the flow of the visual story.

English film and television composer John Altman--who wrote the music for the cult film “Little Voice” and won an Emmy in 2000 for his music for the HBO picture “RKO 281”--is thoroughly familiar with the process. But it’s unlikely that he expected to experience a somewhat similar challenge when he showed up at Spazio on Friday night with his quartet and singer Joan Viskant.

A devotee of the rarely seen (or heard) curved soprano saxophone, Altman is one of the few film composers with authentic jazz skills. (Trumpeters Terence Blanchard, Mark Isham and Mike Figgis--can there be some obscure connection between trumpet and film?--also come to mind.)

Performing with pianist Mike Lang, bassist Bruce Stone and drummer Tim Pleasant, Altman zipped through a few standards, with especially impressive results on a pair of Harry Warren tunes, “There Will Never Be Another You” and “I Wish I Knew”--both, appropriately, from early musical films (the former from 1942’s “Iceland,” the latter from 1945’s “Diamond Horseshoe”). Solidly based in bebop, Altman’s solos arched easily across the harmonies, picking up chromatic references along the way, positioning his phrases with the sort of constructional cohesion one might expect from a gifted composer.

He was well-aided by Lang, a last-minute substitute who, nonetheless, contributed a similarly articulate musical overview to the proceedings. Involved in his playing in typically passionate fashion, Lang--behind Altman and, especially, behind Viskant--added valuable melodic counter lines and harmonic flourishes. In the sometimes chaotic Viskant portion of the set, Lang’s backing provided vital musical framing for a singer, who, despite attractive renderings of tunes such as “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” too often seemed more concerned with communicating her needs to the musicians than connecting with the full house.

That audience was the real story of the evening. Spazio has quickly become the rarest of entities, a popular jazz room with a vibe--even more significantly, one that is drawing a cross-generational crowd. On weekends, musicians must tailor their early sets to a room with a high energy level. Altman offered precisely the right sort of ambient music for that circumstance without sacrificing his ideas or his integrity--exactly what one might have hoped for from a jazz-playing film composer.