Herbie Hancock at Washington DC's Warner Theater 10/20/01

by Alan Greenblatt

Had they lived, Miles Davis and John Coltrane would have turned 75 this year. In honor of this non-event, there have been the requisite articles, CD sets and a touring concert starring Herbie Hancock, who of course was the pianist in one of the classic Miles groups of the 1960s. That 30-city tour pulled into Washington's Warner Theater on Sunday.

Hancock made a long, rambling speech about how they weren't going to try to recreate arrangements from classic Miles and Trane records, instead take the tunes and do something fresh with them. An admirable project. But the renditions of "Impressions," "So What," "Stella by Starlight," while sounding quite different from the originals, weren't really rearranged at all. By which I mean, this new quintet would lay out the melodies and then just play solos.

Although the concert had a lot of strengths and was certainly well-received -- the audience was way more into it and enthusiastic than your normal jazz crowd -- I thought it was in many ways a waste of firepower not to have the musicians challenging each other. Instead, everyone took his turn to blow, then the next guy did his thing. It often sounded impressive but empty.

Sax player Michael Brecker played "Naima" without any accompaniment at all. He sounded great but didn't flesh out any really interesting ideas. Hancock and Brecker both kept playing solos that were essentially tricked-up scales, big flurries of notes that danced around a steadily rising thematic line.

Trumpeter Roy Hargrove was better, sounding gorgeous and playing solos with some rhythmic drive and even a little funk mixed in. He played a lovely flugelhorn solo on "My Ship," doing it as a slow ballad in a manner, in fact, much like the Miles Davis recording. Hargrove was wearing dreads and black leather and at the very moment his solos were done he would strut away from the microphone. How wonderful it would have been if someone with amazing chops like Michael Brecker had taken him on, challenged him to exchange ideas on the spot. That would have been jazz and a necessarily fresh approach.

But the music did get better as the evening wore on because these musicians did listen to one another. John Pattituci got off a couple of solos exceptional in their verve and imagination not just for a bass player but for anyone, while drummer Brian Blade helped him keep up the furious beats that provided the backdrop to all these horn solos.

p.s. If you're looking to hear some jazz tonight or on any Tuesday night, you could do worse than heading to Utopia on U Street NW to hear Nicki Gonzalez, who sings with a keyboard player. Gonzalez sings through her nose just slightly but has a pretty voice nonetheless and in this setting performs very straight renditions of good tunes. During one recent set, she sang numbers by Gershwin and Ellington and followed the Beatles' lovely "Here, There and Everywhere" with George Shearing's "Lullaby of Birdland." No cover.