Intriguing Colley Quartet Deserves a Higher Profile

The Scott Colley Quartet isn’t an ensemble that shows up prominently on anyone’s jazz radar screen. But with a lineup that includes, in addition to bassist Colley, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, guitarist Adam Rogers and drummer Bill Stewart--each a leader in his own right--it should, and, one hopes, soon will.

On Tuesday night at the Jazz Bakery, the quartet played an opening set belying the fact that the musicians were still somewhat glazed from having flown in that afternoon. And Coltrane, his luggage still in transit, played with his usual sense of musical authority, even though he only had a single reed available--and one that did not meet his high standards.

Given the tight schedules that confront most jazz groups, opening nights can always be hazardous, of course. But the Colley players managed, better than most, to adjust quickly to the Bakery’s acoustics and, after the first number, to settle into a productive musical groove.

Their performance was driven throughout by the marvelously symbiotic interaction between Colley and Stewart. Both are vastly more than mere rhythm-section support players, bringing subtle layers of musicality to everything they play. In one instance, Colley opened a piece with a virtuosic cadenza before launching into a high-speed, musically precise bass line. Elsewhere, he brought a sense of compositional structure to the solos of Coltrane and Rogers, shifting and altering his phrasing around their individual flows of invention.

Stewart extracted a stunning array of sounds from his drum kit, using sticks and hands, striking and rubbing his percussion, alternating thunderous bursts of energy with sudden dynamic shifts into small, understated rhythmic passages. He did so, in addition, while maintaining an urgently irresistible sense of swing and forward momentum. Together, Colley and Stewart offered a virtual seminar in the creativity--too often unrevealed--at the heart of the jazz rhythm section.

The combination of Coltrane and Rogers was equally intriguing. In pieces such as Ornette Coleman’s “Alpha,” their similarly dark and mellow sounds interacted and blended, occasionally moving through pungent dissonances, at other times swerving into side-by-side harmony. There was more contrast in their individual efforts, with Coltrane tending to build his choruses by combining and contrasting snippets of instantly generated melody. Rogers, on a different path, favored long, lean phrases, often interrupting their flow with sudden flurries of fast-fingered bop lines.

Best of all, the Colley Quartet revealed its presence at the crest of a new wave of 21st century jazz. Without resorting to artificial insertions and additions of pop music elements, they displayed the evolutionary life force that is omnipresent in the music--beyond bebop, beyond fusion, beyond ‘90s revisionism and beyond the view that jazz must distort its essential identity to survive.

The Scott Colley Quartet at the Jazz Bakery, 3233 Helms Ave., L.A. Tonight through Sunday at 8 and 9:30 p.m. $25. (310) 271-9039.