Greg Osby at the Kennedy Center 1/9/01

by Alan Greenblatt

Last night, full of self-importance, I passed on the opening broadcast of Ken Burns' epic "Jazz" in favor of checking out some live music at that hothouse of experimentalism, the Kennedy Center.

Greg Osby is a hot, youngish (40) alto sax player with a beautiful, deep tone. While Wynton Marsalis was making traditionalism into the dominant jazz mode in the early 1980s, Osby was part of a group that was mixing in other forms, such as reggae, rap and African rhythms, and he's played some lately with Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. Blue Note a couple of months ago put out a CD called "New Directions" which was based on the gimmicky idea of featuring musicians associated with Osby. Osby's own disk, "Invisible Hand," which features the odd couple pairing of pianist Andrew Hill and guitar player Jim Hall, made plenty of critics' best of 2000 listings.

Osby's playing is melodic but sort of skittish. He likes to play in loops and skips, changing registers and creating different motives even as he runs through the main melodic line. On a tune like Miles Davis' "Half Nelson," which is more or less built on scales, he plays a series of short, low phrases, slowly building a vocabulary of more melodic high notes. It was fascinating to hear John Coltrane's "Impressions" stripped down rather than played as a kaleidoscope of hundreds of notes.

This wasn't the natural setting for Osby, playing fairly standard tunes such as "Indiana" and "I Didn't Know About You." He was the guest for a taping of Billy Taylor's public radio program.

Taylor's playing on his own tune "Cote d'Ivoire" was a long unbroken string of notes with the softest, most casual bass lines. Bass player Chip Jackson was less aggressive than at a recent concert with Don Byron, but he continues to show off an apparently newfound love of strumming the bass like a guitar. Drummer Winard Harper got off a couple of intelligent solos, playing high-hat on "Impromptu" in a mix of marching and tap dancing before banging around the rest of his kit with a padded mallet.

There's too much talk at a Taylor show, with Taylor asking the guest broad or generic questions. ("You played with a lot of guys when you were coming up. Who were your mentors?") A woman asked Osby what kinds of reeds and mouthpiece he used. (I once heard Marsalis address an audience in Berkeley and the first thing he told us was who made his trumpet because, he said, he's always asked that.) Still, you get more than an hour's worth of top-flight music for $15, not bad.

Taylor had some unkind things to say about Ken Burns, mostly about his neglecting the last 40 years of jazz in his program. Yesterday, I had lunch with Tim Page, a big-shot critic with the Washington Post who agreed that Burns was wrong in a lot of his musical assertions but said the program is "magnificent television."

Here's a report from music buff Chuck McCutcheon: "This is just my 2 cents, but after watching last night's opening segment of "Jazz" I'd encourage you to try to get a TV set. I never saw the Jefferson documentary, but this was an incredibly fascinating job of explaining the

roots of the music. I've never been a big fan of Wynton Marsalis, but he's extremely articulate and funny and, best of all, can actually play his horn to emphasize the points he makes.