One of the great things about jazz is that if you are witnessing a stage full of talented players, eventually one of them is going to do something interesting. The SF Jazz Collective was getting off to a slow, surprisingly mellow start last Wednesday at Strathmore, but once vibes veteran Bobby Hutcherson took his first solo, things began to pick up. He gave a quick, sublime illustration of those difficult-to-define principles of swing.

 

Hutcherson took a nice long solo a couple of numbers later, his uncluttered playing the .aural equivalent of what people mean by "lucid prose." It wasn't long before I was hoping he would play much more.

 

The SF Jazz Collective grew out of the SF Jazz Festival, back west where I belong. The festival's artistic director, Joshua Redman, leads this group which comes together each year to play both originals written by members of the band and tunes by one noted composer. In the past they've done John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman and this year's model is Herbie Hancock.

 

Although I had walked out humming Hancock's "Watermelon Man" the last time I'd been to Strathmore, to hear Poncho Sanchez, the tunes played by the SF group weren't doing it for me in the same way. A lot of his songs sound dated now. Similarly, the band's originals were mostly not too interesting, contrapuntal phrases in search of a melody. There was a lot of talent up on that stage, but a lot of it was going to waste.

 

It's an 8-piece band that features, in addition to Redman and Hutcherson, the versatile pianist Renee Rosnes and Nicholas Payton. I kept waiting for Payton, in particular, to take the lead and start blowing. He's a trumpeter out of New Orleans with a great big, brassy sound, but here he was just playing a few bleats of harmonies (although he did throw in a quote of "When the Saints" into one number). Even when he did get going enough to get the crowd into it, his solo simply built in pitch and volume but packed no real punch. For his part, Redman a decade ago had the marketing and the warm, welcoming sound to become a big enough star that non-jazz fans had heard of him.

 

The band's celebration of composers and original composition is welcome in an idiom often wedded to the same old songs. But it would have been nice if the pieces weren't so heavily arranged. I enjoyed it, don't get me wrong, but it was too prepared, too cerebral -- much of high seriousness but little heat.

 

But one of the other great things about jazz is that, no matter how much and how long you listen to it, there always seem to be yet more great players you've never heard of. I didn't know the name of Eric Harland, but he's a terrific drummer. Throughout the night, he kept things from getting boring by beating out a heavy bottom and playing with great agility.

 

He finally got the party started with his aptly named composition, "Triumph." His solo woke the place and the band up. Suddenly, he was impatient with the other players, threatening that if they didn't pick things up he was going to roll right over them. He kept it up on the encore, an Ornette Coleman tune, and Harland's spirit infected the other players. Redman and Payton soloed against each other, finding their inner funk and playing low notes and growls.

 

It's what you'd been wanting all night. If the whole show had been as fun as the last two songs -- and certainly the potential was there -- it would have been a great show. Instead, it was a bunch of great players who only had their moments.