Evening of spirit and opportunity

Opportunity and spirit were as present on the stage of Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday night as they were on the surface of Mars. Not in the form of robotic rovers, of course, but in the combination of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and jazz artists Billy Childs, George Duke and Dianne Reeves.

The opportunity was clear enough: The placing of these diverse, artistically bountiful elements in the same environment was, for Childs and Duke, a jazz composer’s dream come true and, for Reeves, a setting lush enough to match her sumptuous voice. The spirit traced to the potentially magical alchemy of jazz improvisation, hard-driving rhythms, talented soloists and a versatile orchestral ensemble.

Childs’ “For Suzanne,” a commissioned work based on the poem “Take for example this:” by e.e. cummings, and Duke’s “Muir Woods Suite” were the focal points of an evening that also included sets by Reeves. In “For Suzanne,” Reeves sang the disjunct melody line that Childs applied to the meandering love poem. The Duke work was an atmospheric set of childhood memories of the Bay Area forest.

Each defined the opportunities and the hazards faced by jazz composers writing for a combination of large orchestral ensembles and small, improvising jazz groups. “For Suzanne” was, in essence, two disparate segments combined into one piece. In the first segment, Childs’ mastery of orchestral writing was fully on display, with roving, intercrossing string lines weaving a dense tapestry of sound beneath Reeves’ floating vocals. The work’s middle section set aside the compositional elements in favor of a lengthy set of improvisations from Childs and Reeves.

The amalgam of styles in “Muir Woods” was appropriate to a work aimed at depicting different aspects of a diverse natural setting. And Duke enhanced his portrayal with solo spots for bassist Reuben Rogers, drummer Greg Hutchinson and percussionist Munyungo Jackson, as well as an enterprising effort, in one movement, to generate swinging unison jazz passages from the string section.

The opportunities in both works, however, were diluted by their composers’ apparent needs to prove their capacity to write effectively and professionally for a large orchestra -- which they did. But in the process, the creativity intrinsic to the less grandiose efforts of Childs and Duke surfaced only rarely.

One wondered what might have resulted if these two gifted artists had taken the risk of approaching large-scale works by setting aside their orchestration books, unleashing the improvisational genius of jazz and letting their inventive spirits fly.