Dave Stryker and Steve Slagle at Blues Alley 7/11/00

by Alan Greenblatt

Last night at Blues Alley, Dave Stryker and Steve Slagle offered a powerful reminder of how much talent there is in the jazz world. The two are not terribly well-known -- they're New York musicians who usually fill out the bands of better-known players such as Stanley Turrentine -- but playing their own stuff, they were technically more than proficient, well-versed in jazz history, and sounded great.

The two, backed by drummer Tim Horner and bass player Bill Warring, will give free performances tonight (6:30 pm) at Arlington Courthouse Plaza, and tomorrow at noon at Crystal City.

It's a sign of my mellowing tolerance of all things that I enjoyed their Blues Alley set so well. There was a time when such semi-electrified bebop would have gotten on my nerves. But I think with the current crop of jazz musicians, rock idioms are so much a part of the world they grew up in that throwing in some rock licks sounds perfectly natural.

Stryker plays guitar, and clearly some part of him wishes he were a big star blues musicians, playing poignant powerful runs, complete with lip-biting, that would make the girls go crazy. He and Slagle often state their melodies in tandem, like the early beboppers. They like to play lots of notes, but not just in the service of showing off. Each of them knows how to build a solo so that it allows for some sort of climax.

Slagle plays alto sax, mainly, with a bit of soprano sax thrown in here and there. He has an admirably clear tone and showed himself a thoughtful ballad player on his original "What Goes Around Comes Around." The group played a lively atmospheric piece called "Cape Town" and some originals based on "I Got Rhythm," into which Slagle inserted quotations from Charlie Parker's many variations on "Cherokee."

He has a shaved head and a soul patch and maintained a sort of glowering presence until the audience finally got its act together to applaud individual solos. Then you could see Slagle's delight in the admiration and his own pleasure in his good playing.