Michael Cuscuna, the jazz-loving American record producer responsible for rekindling the Blue Note label, makes a telling point about the 1960s Miles Davis Quintet in an upcoming episode of Ken Burns's Jazz series on BBC2. He observes that the almost telepathic ensemble brought an unprecedented elasticity to collective improvising in jazz - a many-layered fluidity of dialogue. It happened because Davis was taking what he needed from both the straightahead tradition and the avant-garde to make a new music that didn't sound quite like either of them.
Trumpeter Wallace Roney's quintet is a homage to that band, as Roney's own playing has been one of the most creative of homages to Davis. It was Roney who stood at the elbow of an ailing Davis at the Montreux festival in the last year of that baleful genius's life, playing the taxing parts of Gil Evans's arrangements that Davis could no longer handle.
Yet this fine Roney group is an improvising band at the very edge of this method's parameters, not a "legends" band trying to sound like the records. And although the 1960s Davis quintet was its guide, Roney also delivered some exquisite muted-horn slow playing from a much earlier Davis style, as well as the choppy, synth-driven funk and sound-texture impressionism of the electric fusion era that hustled its way onstage in the 1970s.
Drummer Lenny White, a fusion hero, was the heartbeat, and a pretty loud one at that. Frequently played head down, his eyes closed as if in meditation, White's work was a tour de force of complex patterns that were periodically disrupted by jolting offbeats and shooting-star cymbal explosions. He also displayed an ebbing and flowing of dynamics and intensity thrillingly evocative of the late Tony Williams.
Roney's clipped, staccato runs and hauntingly trilling long notes over driving percussion and pianist Adam Holzman's restless, frothing keyboard figures mingled with the soulful sound and rugged phrasing of the excellent Gary Bartz on saxes. The latter has been a cult figure of the improvisational end of fusion for 20 years.
Some of the highlights of a very classy set were brazen, joyous jazz-funk, muted ballad playing over glowering keyboard sounds and pattering drums, and a knowing mid-tempo groove that turned into a White drum break in which his sticks were a blur. (However, a periodically arrhythmic journey snapped back into the groove with breathtaking precision.) Jazz on 3 plans to broadcast it on a Friday night sometime next month.
