Pianist Steve Kuhn, electric bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Joey Baron held little back Wednesday night, delivering a set of richly emotional jazz that brimmed with personality.
Simply put, Kuhn, 75, Swallow, 72, and Baron, the band’s junior member at 58, revealed who they were.
Baron was the group’s biggest extrovert, a grinning wild card of a drummer. He was unafraid of lifting the music with a tumult of notes, but could inject just as much meaning with a deft hit to the edge of a cymbal. Every note that Baron played seemed to be the right one, and had Swallow and Kuhn not been the strong, distinctive players that they were, Baron might have consistently stolen the show with his inventiveness, taste and positivity.
Swallow was the group’s low-frequency eminence grise, a rumbling accompanist who also stepping out with some of the night’s most remarkable solos. On the set’s closer, a medley of Kuhn’s grand and moody pieces Trance and Oceans In The Sky, he contributed a solo that was so well constructed that Bach could not have improved upon it. Kuhn also gave his long-time bass-playing friend — Kuhn and Swallow first played together in the mid-1960s, when Swallow played acoustic bass — much-deserved recognition as a great jazz composer, playing the bassist’s tunes Remember and Eiderdown.
Kuhn was droll and affable, clear in his intentions whether swinging broadly on There Is No Greater Love, which opened the concert, casting a lilting Latin spell on his piece Adagio or making space and silence count on an airy, minimalist rendition of Henry Mancini’s Slow Hot Wind.
Kuhn added levity to the show, first when he mimed striking piano keys that weren’t there, beyond the top of the instrument’s register, and again during the encore, his original The Zoo, when he sang its laconic lyrics with a stand-up comic’s timing, if not a jazz singer’s polished voice.
Kuhn was also up to the challenge of a very serious jazz endeavour — investing one of the music’s most overplayed tunes with new, tender feeling. The trio played Stella By Starlight as a slow ballad, and despite that tune’s overexposure on bandstands the world over, Kuhn, Swallow and Barron made it sound personal, fresh and alive.
UPDATE: Veteran Ottawa jazz fan and vocalist Gaby Warren informs me: “Kuhn always plays Stella By Starlight — it was his mother’s name.”
