An Enemy of Monotony
Greg Osby isn't a transcendent genius. This is about the worst thing you can say of him. A master of the alto saxophone, crowd manipulation and dynamics, his latest stand at the Jazz Standard saw him in superb form, and the performance refuted two contrary and regrettable but widely prevalent notions: alternately that jazz is a museum music and that the way to keep it from becoming one is constantly to surrender it to cheap tricks and novelty.
Mostly, he plays clean, articulate lines and long, sustained notes, and when, for emphasis, he indulges in a touch of vibrato or jab-like discursive phrases, he surrounds them with silent pauses to mark them out. His compositions are structurally unorthodox because of a similar belief in self-control-he doesn't insist on giving everyone room to solo, and his preferred devices are pretty stolid stuff, including a subtle kind of call-and-response, drum and piano washes and clever dropouts; this marks him apart from the cacophonists who mistake chaos for creativity and all the leaders who mistake endless soloing for traditionalism. He's one of the few serious leaders who would be willing to set a whole number over a straight hip-hop beat and an eight-note bass riff, and one of even fewer who could pull it off without seeming to pander to the belief that jazz needs to be married to hip-hop to survive.
All of this restraint is well-rooted in one of jazz's best traditions, the high modernism of Andrew Hill, Eric Dolphy and Lennie Tristano, which incorporates all the humor and spontaneity of free jazz while rejecting its excesses, indiscipline and tendency towards a monolithic sound.
Osby, along with pianist Corey Smythe, bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Rodney Green, showed a nearly peerless understanding of the intricacies of that tradition and of group dynamics last Thursday at the Standard. Smythe was unafraid to leave Brewer and Green to carry the rhythm while he repeated a simple block-chord phrase half a dozen times or more; Osby frequently left his men to count off two or three beats apiece while holding them together with little punctuations.
The quartet often seemed on the verge of flying apart, with everyone following their own line and the drops and stop-time breaks piling up, and yet never did. This was richly textured music; Osby and his men are enemies of monotony.
This led to wonderful moments, the kind you don't really notice until they've passed. Two-thirds of the way through the show the band went from the peak of their velocity-the "regions unknown" Osby mentioned to the audience when introducing the group, which saw the leader bringing his right hand up from the bottom of the horn to fretfully tap at the highest keys on its neck-into a mournful duet so simply and easily that it seemed rudimentary.
That kind of seamless transitioning requires musicians to have a near-total faith in one another, and an almost insolent disregard for the expectations of an audience, which does not naturally assume that a high-tempo workout will flow into a melancholic expression of sorrow and regret. The ground had been laid, though, by all the times in which the players went off on their own lines, and their use of so many discursive asides-bits of rattletrap piano, military snare and murmuring horn-which shift the tensions within a number, vary the intensity, relieve or ratchet up the pressure and generally erase the distinctions between head and solo, and between one number and the next.
To do this within the framework of a mainstream hard-bop set (Osby even played "Now's The Time," of all things) is pretty remarkable, these days; the rigidity of the style, bad enough in its own right, has become an excuse for hundreds of generic musicians in the city to play the most generic sort of music, the sort that has no evident flaws and also not a glimmer of emotion. Immersion in tradition is supposed to liberate, rather than constrict; listening to Osby exhort, mourn and go silent at all the right times, it becomes a lot easier to believe that some people still understand this.