From the August 2013 issue of The New York City Jazz Record.
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One of bassist Ben Allison’s recent obsessions is the music of Jim Hall, which he’s explored live with the gifted Steve Cardenas on guitar. In a four-night run at Dizzy’s, Allison maintained a focus on Hall at least in part while changing up the personnel. Saxophonist Ted Nash and drummer Matt Wilson, longtime Allison cohorts, joined guitarist Peter Bernstein in a versatile lineup that devoted its second Thursday set (July 11th) to tunes by Hall, Thelonious Monk, the late Jimmy Giuffre and Allison himself. Bernstein has few rivals in terms of tone, expression and harmonic insight in the straightahead arena. His experiences with Jimmy Cobb, Lou Donaldson and other masters haven’t entailed much close contact with Allison, whose projects tend to fall more outside the box. But the two are longtime New York residents in their mid-40s with compatible outlooks, and their vibe felt natural. The band sound was sparse and airy, equally suited to the folky aesthetic of Giuffre’s “The Train and the River” and Monk’s perennial “Criss Cross.” Allison’s “Weazy,” a slower ambling waltz, found Nash and Bernstein voicing harmonies once played by Michael Blake on two saxophones at once (on Allison’s 2001 Palmetto disc Riding the Nuclear Tiger). Jim Hall’s “Bimini” and “Waltz New,” the latter a challenging line on the changes to “Someday My Prince Will Come,” brought the intensity up a notch, but Allison’s “Green Al” closed in a mellower soul mood, putting Bernstein’s bluesy vocabulary to inspired use. (David R. Adler)
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A native of Michigan now based in Rome, pianist Greg Burk remains underappreciated and doesn’t surface all that often in New York. But at Measure (formerly Bar on Fifth) he had the good fortune of a weeklong Manhattan gig, rotating solo piano, trios and quartets on different nights — a plan that seemed to mirror the variety of his superb recorded output. His first trio set on Monday (July 8th) began at a medium tempo with the bop-oriented head “Blues in O,” which gave bassist Joseph Lepore and drummer Harvey Wirht some time to find the right pocket in a rather noisy room. (It’s a hotel lounge with the band relegated to the far corner.) Continuing with the harmonically involved “Calypsus” and the fast chromatic free-bop environment of “BC,” Burk drove the trio toward creative peaks and shared solo space generously. The one standard was “Take the ‘A’ Train” at a spikey and loose waltz tempo, an apt showcase for the understated Wirht during the trading choruses. “Song for IAIA,” which led off Burk’s 2011 trio recording The Path Here (482 Music), started with a quasi-boogie-woogie figure in the left hand and generated a back-and-forth between sweetly soaring melodies and static groove sections. The gospel-funk finale “One Day” carried a hint of Horace Silver and typified the trio’s mix of casual old-school feel and tight execution. Later in the month Lepore would return to the club with his own band, featuring saxophonist Joel Frahm, pianist Luis Perdomo and drummer Francisco Mela. (DA)
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