One of those weekends that makes you glad to live in the big city. Unusually intelligent discussion at the charming old theater at the Folger Shakespeare Library featuring the novelist Marilyn Robinson... crowded galleries for the Modigliani show, at the Phillips, and Rembrandt and Andre Kertesz, at the National Gallery... yummy Chinese food, homemade catfish and fine yuppie pizza at Paradiso... most of the books I wanted in at the library...

 

And, for our purposes, a standout jazz concert at the Kennedy Center. I have been going to the center a lot lately -- New York City Ballet, an exceptional NSO program of Brahms and Sibelius, conducted by Osmo Vanska -- but clearly it's become a key place for jazz fans. They're able to afford big names and have them bring super talented sidemen with them. Next season, the KC Jazz Club will host 80 performances, about double this year's number and three times as much as last year's inaugural season.

 

But still, the place has its drawbacks. Usually, it's a staid crowd, for instance. The audience was pumped, though, on Saturday night for a group led by the drummer Roy Haynes. It was a great show, but we left disappointed.

 

Why? The Kennedy Center splits all its jazz shows now, so there's a 7:30 set and a 9:30 set, each requiring separate admission. They play their 75 or 80 minutes and you're done. This was a big crowd at the Terrace Theater, on their feet and stomping for an encore, applauding long after the house lights had been brought up. But it was no dice. I was at the late show, and the Post reports no encore for the early set, either. It feels a little ungenerous.

 

What brought the crowd to their feet? Haynes took a big solo, pounding away at the bass drum and scattering his sticks all over the cymbals. It was high energy excitement, sustained for a long time, yet always controlled and never over the top. When he was done, he bolted out of his seat and stepped away in quick triumph, like a boxer who has just delivered the knockout blow.

 

Haynes, who turned 80 yesterday, looks quite a bit younger, wearing some velvet pajama-type pants (a tribute to Michael Jackson?). He's got a bald head with just a little tuft of grey hair right at the back. He's been around forever and has made records with everybody. As an accompanist, he's got a light touch, keeping steady time on the cymbal and dropping smart accent notes here and there.

 

When things started, he just sat there, hand in his chin, nodding at what the other guys were playing, each man playing a few bars alone before they all joined in together.

 

This was billed, as so many jazz concerts, as a tribute, in this case to Charlie Parker. There weren't all that many tunes by or associated with Parker, though, and alto sax player Kenny Garrett made no effort to sound or play like the great man. It's interesting to me that we're now having tribute shows that aren't really in any way tributes; clearly, it's all marketing.

 

If anything, Garrett sounded like he was playing tribute to Sonny Rollins, in that he took a similar approach to soloing. He took long, kaleidoscopic solos that were made up of short phrases that were heavily rhythmic and lacked much continuity to each other.

 

The pianist, David Kikoski, is apparently a Haynes regular. No one could have played with more enthusiasm. You've never seen such a gangly piano player. His suit hung on him almost like David Byrne's in "Stop Making Sense," his head bobbed, he wore a big upside-down smile all the time. He tried hard to stay out of the other players' way when they soloed. During his own turns, it was clear, as my buddy John Scheinman points out, that he's absorbed a ton of Oscar Peterson. He loves those big cascading solos.

 

The bass player was Christian McBride, who is always marvelous. He's the most recorded bass player of this generation and you can tell why. He's got a great, fat sound and when he's playing alongside of someone he's right there, following whatever turn the soloist suddenly decides to take. Naturally the bass player doesn't solo much but when he does, he's one of those guys who can play the thing with ease like a guitar, but he preserves his instrument's essential low-sounding qualities.

 

Good stuff. In reality, it was enough, and we didn't need an encore, but it would have been nice if the guys could have come back to take another bow.