This year's Angel City Jazz Festival ended with something old and something new.
The new was bassist Billy Mohler's updated quartet, performing music from his just-issued "Ultraviolet." A glance at Mohler's successful pop-oriented C.V. reveals he's playing jazz because he wants to, luckily for us. And the switch of saxist and drummer from the album's excellent quartet showed the strength of the compositions, which here took on alternate but not inferior personalities.
Part of the resilience sprang from the relative simplicity of the tunes, which are founded on bass riffs but call for harmonic expansion in the horn interplay. Another part devolved from the choice of new members to augment trumpeter Shane Endsley: Both tenorman Mark Turner and drummer Jonathan Pinson are bandleaders in their own right. But even though Turner's naturally controlled, burnished flights dwelled a world apart from the vernacular spontaneity of his predecessor, Chris Speed, he still danced easily with Endsley, a clean player who made his dissonances sound melodic. A real mean team.
Equally unlike the relaxed dude he replaced (Nate Wood) was Pinson, a sturdy powerhouse who sounded ever-ready to explode, especially on the quick-driving "Disorder," but who was always slapping little ticks around the edges of his cymbals, as on the record's happily lumbering title tune. If you were bobbing your head in the back, and you looked down and saw most every head doing the same thing, you knew something was connecting.
Todd Cochran is some kind of piano genius, which may present difficulties for him. When you can play anything, how do you construct a set?
On this occasion, the onetime San Francisco revolutionary (and since a respected concert and session performer) decided on a smorgasbord. He warmed up soft, almost sentimental, his touch in the midrange, clear, deliberate but flowing. His tribute to Clifford Brown's wife, on the other hand, had a quality of marching persistence.
If we were surprised that Cochran was once asked by Uncle Sam to sail jazz overseas, Sam must have been more alarmed by Cochran's treatment of "The Star Spangled Banner," which wrung every ounce of discord and fantastical potential from the ragged anthem, enough to make a listener dare to hope. Few have mustered the guts to attempt the hairy hesitations and tempo changes of Thelonious Monk's "Brilliant Corners," but Cochran made it sound almost smooth.
Most of this was accomplished with the aid of John Leftwich, a precise, aggressive bassist who took the unusual stance of watching the eyes of Cochran rather than the hands of drummer Lyndon Rochelle. Rochelle's rambling kit sounded like part of the piano, so closely did his groove ride with the keys; his cymbals, especially one old bent squishy one, acted as flowing fabric to color the whole stream.
Cochran called out his old friend Bennie Maupin to run gently up and down bass clarinet and soprano sax on a couple of Afro-grooving final numbers. It was good to see him.
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Listen to and buy Billy Mohler's "Ultraviolet" here.
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PHOTO BY FUZZY BAROQUE.