“TWENTY degrees hotter, and we could be in New Orleans,” said a voice behind me, as the Wynton Marsalis Septet eased into the old spiritual Just a Closer Walk With Thee. With its simple melody, long-note harmony from the horns and unadorned rhythm playing, we might easily have been in Preservation Hall, until the mood changed and the trumpeter blasted off into high-speed stratospherics.
Back in Britain for the first time since his Barbican concerts in January with the Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra, Marsalis has returned to the small-group format that best suits his playing, forsaking the distant formality of the concert hall for the cheek-by-jowl jostling of a club setting.
So close was the contact that the audience was almost a part of the band, with asides and repartee carrying on between numbers, and the trumpeter making eye contact with his listeners as he worked the room, playing virtually without amplification.
Although this was a septet gig, the core of the band was just a quartet, consisting of Marsalis and rhythm section, with Herlin Riley following his every move on the drums, Reginald Veal’s flying fingers on the bass and the remarkably accomplished playing of 17-year-old Aaron Diehl on piano. Whether shadowing Marsalis’s bristling boppish runs at breakneck tempo, supporting his Clifford Brown-ish ballad playing or providing the two-beat for one of the oldest tunes in jazz, Buddy Bolden’s Making Runs, the rhythm playing was exemplary, with Riley yet again proving that he is the hardest swinging drummer in jazz today.
The front-line horns had to contend with playing alongside the sheer genius of Marsalis. His control, dynamics, perfectly formed phrasing and torrent of ideas are hard to match, and in their different ways the saxophonists Wes Anderson and Victor Goines and trombonist Ron Westray tried their best. Anderson’s bluesy alto playing was most successful in consistently contrasting with the trumpeter’s more open, spacious approach, but both Goines and Westray tended to produce too many notes with too little to say.
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A guest spot by Marsalis’s current protégé, the 14-year-old Sicilian altoist Francesco Cafiso, showed what was possible if inhibition was cast to the winds. The front line’s ensemble playing, however, was superb, and their rapport on pieces like Song 26 and Down Home at Home hinted at what might have happened had Marsalis dived further into the book of septet arrangements that lay largely unopened on his music stand. But as he said, with two more nights at the club this week, there’s plenty more music to be played and plenty of time to play it.
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