Mark Murphy at Blues Alley 1/18/01

by Alan Greenblatt

Whenever Republicans take over a town, I turn to Mark Murphy. One of the musical highlights of my life was when he did three nights at a hotel in San Diego in the days leading up to the 1996 GOP convention. His second set each night was a long, unbroken string of songs associated with Miles Davis that he sang with great rhythmic invention.

Murphy was at Blues Alley last Thursday, but I managed to miss it. I went to a symphony pops concert for the Post and headed over to Blues Alley afterwards. By the time I got there, Murphy was 20 minutes into his last set. Too little music left for those kinds of prices. However, I found out that you can hear the music perfectly well standing in the alley outside that club.

I listened to Murphy run through "Bye Bye Blackbird" and "Autumn Leaves" and "On Green Dolphin Street" before the cold and the noise of neighboring generators drove me off. When Murphy's on, there's no one who can touch him in terms of representing the sound of surprise and free abandon or however Ken Burns puts it. When he's going through the motions, as he was Thursday, his odd phrasing and squawks can seem a little shopworn.

But in keeping with the new conservatism here in Washington, I actually sat down for an old-fashioned show by Tommy Flanagan at Baird Auditorium in the Museum of Natural History. Flanagan is a pianist and was Ella Fitzgerald's accompanist for years. He plays a melody fairly straight but has a beautiful, articulate touch. He never seems to overdo; his spare playing can convince you that he's giving you the pure, distilled essence of a song.

Most of the show was given over to Duke Ellington tunes -- "Warm Valley" and "In a Mellotone" and "What Am I Here For" and a beautiful obscurity called "Sunset and the Mockingbird" that Flanagan played solo. For most of the rest he was joined by fellow Ella alum Keter Betts on bass, whose playing was fairly ordinary, although he got the crowd revved with some bent notes, and drummer Chuck Redd, who I was listening to carefully as I will be writing about him for washingtonpost.com (watch for it!).

The trio was joined by trumpeter Joe Wilder. I have written in this space before about how Wilder possesses a terrific, golden tone that sounds almost the same whether he's playing trumpet or flugelhorn, but that Wilder has lost his chops. His notes can go all spluttery, but he still knows how to put across a tune and did all right on the ballads.