Jazz Review : Complex Improvisations From Lovano’s Quartet at the Bakery

Joe Lovano must have a lot of confidence in the receptivity of his audiences. His one-nighter at the Jazz Bakery Thursday night made very few concessions to easy listening.

The New York-based tenor saxophonist, one of the premier jazz men of the ‘90s, has worked in a variety of styles, with players as diverse as John Scofield, Bill Frisell and Charlie Haden. But the music of his own quartets leans heavily in the direction of dense, unrelentingly complex improvisation.

An opening original, “Song and Dance,” for example, began with an appealingly boppish, start-and-stop melody. But the line was almost immediately set aside for extended soloing by Lovano, trumpeter Tim Hagans and bassist Darek Oleszkiewicz . Other tunes, despite such deceptively lyrical titles as “Birds of Spring in Time Gone By” and “Miss Etna,” similarly served as springboards for individual improvisations. Much of it was impressive, with Lovano occasionally coloring his solos with bristling, avant-garde noise components and stratospheric upper harmonics. On a rare ballad, “This Is Always,” he allowed a few touches of lyricism to sneak into his chorus.

What was missing throughout, however, was a sense of group interactivity. Hagans and Lovano work together regularly, but Oleszkiewicz and drummer Carmen Castaldi are West Coast players added for this engagement. Although both are skilled musicians, the quality of their participation was understandably defined, and limited, by a minimal amount of rehearsal time.

But the music Lovano plays--with its intricate improvising and multilayered rhythms--is at its best when there is a familiar, intuitive interplay among the musicians. Unlimited by compositional restrictions, the music gains its structure from a kind of spontaneous group creativity. And too often, on Thursday night, that group creativity was simply not present.