Flowing at Yoshi's

Here in hot Stockton, California (more than a month of daytime temperatures in the nineties or higher, with no relief), the young musicians of the Brubeck Institute’s Summer Colony are learning to be better improvisers. I’ll hear some of them for the first time this afternoon when one of their combos plays at my book signing. The faculty members, who include Ingrid Jensen, Hal Crook and Bart Marantz, tell me that this is a notably gifted bunch of teenagers.

This year’s Yoshi’s distinguished artist-in-residence is Terence Blanchard. Last night, the seventeen colonists, Institute director J.B. Dyas, some of the faculty and I piled into vans and cars and drove eighty miles to Oakland to hear Blanchard’s band at Yoshi’s. Oakland was overcast and cool. Mark Twain famously said that the worst winter he ever spent was one August in San Francisco.

Blanchard’s band, with sidemen averaging not much older than the age of the colonists, concentrated on music from his new CD, Flow. In a long set, they played four pieces, none of them quite free, at least not in the Ornette Coleman sense; none of them straight ahead. They incorporated African elements centered in the astonishing vocal and rhythmic utterances of the guitarist Lionel Louweke, and a variety of world music influences. They played to each other with virtuosity and great enthusiasm. Blanchard demonstrated his mastery of the trumpet. Tenor saxophonist Bryce Swanson, particularly on the piece called (I think) “Wandering Wander,” played with impressive tone and use of space. The drummer, Kendrick Scott, filled and accented beautifully, with internal rhythms and colors that shifted and shimmered.

Pianist Aaron Parks consistently invented chord changes where there were no changes, underscoring by contrast what, for me, was the problem with this band. They were having a splendid time playing for one another, and their enthusiasm transmitted to the audience. Still, except for Parks’s enchanting harmonies on the hymn-like “Over There,” the music lacked harmonic elements on which I could get a handle. And it was missing the consistent time that makes the best jazz performances compelling. At the end, I was full of admiration for the Blanchard band’s skill and elan, but went away unsatisfied and rather empty.