Ellis Marsalis + Devin Phillips - Aladdin Theater (Portland, OR; Apr. 16, 2011)

Saturday night found me in the grittier end of southeast Portland, where Ellis Marsalis, one of modern jazz music’s most notable performers, was taking the stage at the venerable Aladdin Theater. The Soul’d Out Music Festival had kicked off ten days earlier with another group of New Orleans musicians, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, a group celebrating the heritage of an early style of jazz music so strongly associated with the city that it bears its name. Ellis Marsalis, who came of age in a period when jazz was undergoing rapid evolution, and whose music represents a decisive departure from New Orleans jazz, serves as an apt counterpart to his fellow New Orleanians, offering an example of the variability of jazz music and demonstrating the dramatic changes it underwent in less than three decade’s time.

Opening for Marsalis was Devin Phillips, a saxophonist and New Orleans native who relocated to Portland in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Philips, appropriately, was educated at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, the school where Ellis Marsalis once taught and which includes his sons Wynton and Branford among its alumni. Phillips, heading a standard four-piece ensemble consisting of Andrew Oliver on piano, Erik Gruber on bass, and Mark Griffin on drums, began his set by laying out a melody alone, establishing a tension in the hushed room that drew all focus to himself, effecting a sort of tunnel vision as he stood near the front of the stage seemingly as absorbed as everybody else in what he was doing. Suddenly, with a drum kick from Griffin, the band joined in and the spell was broken, and Phillips seamlessly transitioned into a solo with the full accompaniment of his band. Phillips boasts a diverse musical background, but on this night he was grounded in bebop and hard bop. His set, which included arrangements by sax luminaries John Coltrane and Joe Henderson, served to anchor Phillips in that tradition, as well as emphasized his own virtuosity. On “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” Phillips showed traces of a Trane influence, but mostly stuck to his own, somewhat less feverish style. He allowed plenty of space for his band too, with most numbers featuring extended solos for Oliver and Gruber. Griffin however, though exciting to watch and clearly a dynamic drummer, largely stayed in the background, supporting the other musicians without taking on the spotlight himself. On the final number of the set, though, he performed an extended solo, beginning with a beat that seemed so basic that one wondered if it was merely by way of transition from Gruber to Phillips. But, almost imperceptibly, the beat gathered in complexity and rose to a crescendo before climaxing, opening the door for Phillips to step in with his saxophone to reassert the melody and close out the set.

Ellis Marsalis was greeted, as he ought to be, with an enormous ovation. At 76, Marsalis is not only the patriarch of an immensely important jazz family – his sons Wynton and Branford achieved national fame before he did, and youngest son Jason accompanied him on the vibraphones – but also a renowned musical educator in New Orleans; first at Xavier University, then at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where Grammy winners Harry Connick, Jr, and Nicholas Payton were among his students, and later as Director of Jazz studies at the University of New Orleans. His relatively limited discography then, fails to reflect a lifetime of titanic influence upon New Orleans’ rich music scene. The savvy crowd at the Aladdin, however, was in no way confused by Marsalis’ rather complex resume. The stature of Marsalis within the jazz scene speaks for itself, of course, but underlying that is the recognition that Marsalis is one of a generation of jazz pianists that were instrumental in the dramatic redefinition of jazz that engendered its shift from dance music to art form. Marsalis himself, though too modest to call his own name, implicitly paid tribute to that legacy with a pair of Thelonious Monk covers, “Monk’s Moods” and “Evidence.” On the latter, Marsalis employed Monk’s signature comping style on the piano, and for a time Jason Marsalis, in a display of incredible chemistry between father and son, played the vibes in perfect complement to him, such that the keys that each struck merged into one another and were virtually impossible to distinguish.

Later in the evening, performing John Lewis’ “Django,” the band conspired to produce an uncharacteristically dark and ambient structure, which carried on just long enough to allow the effect to seep in, then suddenly broke into a cheery, casually uptempo rendition of the melody more akin to the version Lewis recorded with the Modern Jazz Quartet. The unmistakable impression was of ominous clouds suddenly lifted, summer arrived, and all cares or worries lost in the warmth of the sun. Jazz is often evocative, of course, but here it bordered on descriptive, and showed a brief flash of the tendency to the avant-garde that distinguished Marsalis’ playing as an up-and-coming jazz musician in New Orleans in the 1960’s. After another John Lewis number, and to the tune of a brief, playful piece, Marsalis acknowledged each member of his band, which, in addition to Jason Marsalis, consisted of Jason Stewart on bass and Darrian Douglas on drums. Then, the band gathered behind the vibraphones, took a collective bow, and departed. The audience was immediately on its feet for a thunderous standing ovation, and, as a few moved to gather their coats and head for the exit, Marsalis and company returned for one last song, appropriately, and touchingly, Branford Marsalis’ “Doctone.” Marsalis’ influence extends far beyond the work of his sons, and his career, though unconventional, has been indisputably ripe, but this encore cast the performance in a different light. The focus implicitly shifted, at this point, to an elderly man performing with one of his six sons a song composed by another, to an overwhelmingly appreciative audience very far from his home. It may be Ellis Marsalis’ good fortune that he gets to do this sort of thing all the time; if anything, that makes it all the more poignant. If Marsalis’ success was to be taken for granted at the beginning of the performance, by the end of the show he had redefined and personalized it – and thereby left the stage, jovially smiling, having demonstrated an enviable measure of success on his own terms.

Ellis Marsalis review to your liking? You'll sweat:

Preservation Hall Jazz Band + MarchFourth Marching Band - Crystal Ballroom (Portland; Apr. 7, 2011)

Lauryn Hill + Hot 8 Brass Band - Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall (Portland, OR; Apr. 9, 2011)

Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears + Those Darlins - Dante’s (Portland, OR; Apr. 10, 2011)

Ice Cube + Luck-One + Erok and Mayo – Roseland Theater (Portland, OR; Apr. 8, 2011)

0 comments thus far ...

melophobe sponsors

Connect To melophobe

1. melophobe
2. concert reviews
3. fifty-word reviews
4. articles
5. links
6.