by Craig Brinker
Ravi Coltrane is currently in the midst of a six-day run at Jazz Standard, playing with three different quartets during his stand at the venue—an unusual arrangement that will give each performance a slightly different flavor.
Friday night's group included trumpeter Jason Palmer, drummer Bill Stewart, and bassist Christian McBride. The group began their set with a blazing rendition of Thelonius Monk's “Skippy,” reveling in the tune's pronounced chromaticism (highly chromatic and angular arrangements were a pronounced theme throughout the evening). The rhythm section hurtled along with inexhaustible momentum, while Coltrane played an aggressive, jagged solo, his horn a neverending fount of fresh ideas.
This iteration of Coltrane's quartet wasn't interested in merely exploring the large-scale ideas of form and structure. Although they traded solos in the expected manner of experienced straight-ahead players, the quartet also focused on small moments of discovery—with individual ideas coming together or diverging in a particularly interesting or fortuitous manner. The one exception to this was a Paul Motion tune, "Fantasm" (the only tune played during the evening from Coltrane's newest release, Spirit Fictions), a slower, almost tempoless group meditation on a beautiful, chromatic melody.
The interactions between Stewart and McBride—two of the finest players in contemporary jazz—showcased their differing stylistic tendencies, a musical tension that gave the execution an additional level of excitement. Stewart is a tightly wound player, his entire body tense, occasionally exploding with a well-timed accent or fill; McBride is much more relaxed in his playing, carefully articulate, with each note sounding clearly in his impossibly fast solos. The two musicians provided a relentless, driving background that pushed the solists to play fervent, often biting, improvisations.
There wasn't as much in the set for the casual listener to grab onto as on some of Coltrane's records, and the lack of a chordal instrument often made for austere listening: The whole night was filled with highly sophisticated, cerebral music—music made by a group of very fine players enjoying each other's ability to present complex ideas in quick succession and at high velocities.
The younger Coltrane has done an impressive job creating a unique place for himself in the jazz world, stepping lightly around the looming shadow of his famous father. If one compares jazz to spoken language, John Coltrane was a master of high-church Latin, an air of otherworldly spirituality infusing his most powerful compositions; his son, however, plays more like a theoretical physicist explaining the intricacies of the Higgs Boson. Although both father and son are capable of proclaiming large, universal truths, each comes at the subject from a distinctly different angle.