Jessica’s Night

Jessica Williams played a magnificent solo concert Saturday night at The Seasons. A tall, luminous presence in dark tones and silver, she began with her new-agey composition called “Love and Hate” and followed it with an explanation that it was “the sort of thing you’d hear on top-forty radio.” Well, not quite, but it prompted concern in the hall that we might be headed for an evening in George Winston territory. That worry began dissipating when she was eight bars into Billy Eckstine’s “I Want To Talk About You.” It was gone forever by the time she played “Monks’ Mood,” which opened an extended Thelonious Monk medley that ended up swinging so hard and so deeply that the audience of 300 was a mass of smiling faces on bobbing heads. The nine-foot Steinway was stunning in its unamplified glory in the hall’s perfect acoustics. Her command of it was breathtaking.
Williams prefaced a Duke Ellington segment with the observation that she can’t play his music without feeling his warmth. The warmth filled the room as she explored “Mood Indigo,” “In My Solitude” and “Take The ‘A’ Train” in an Ellington segment laced with allusions to several of his other tunes. Engaging if charmingly distracted in her conversation between pieces, she told of opening for Bill Evans at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco in the 1980s. After her first set, she recalled, she passed Evans on the stairs and he said, “Where the _____ did you come from?” a compliment she still relishes. (The chaste “_____” is hers, not mine). Then, she captured several aspects of Evans in her composition “Bill’s Beauty.”
“You’re such a great audience,” she said, “that I’m going to take requests.” Before she finished talking, someone jumped the gun. A loud male voice asked for John Coltrane’s “Wise One.” She grinned. “Just for that,” she said, “I won’t play it.” The next request was for “Giant Steps. No, she said; if Tommy Flanagan wouldn’t play it, neither would she. It was a good-natured, but odd, refusal. Not only was Flanagan the pianist on Coltrane’s celebrated 1959 recording of the piece, but he also recorded it in 1981 with his quartet, and made trio versions in 1982 with George Mraz and Al Foster and 1983 with Ron Carter and Tony Williams. No matter; Williams was happy to comply with the next request, for “’Round Midnight.” Again, Monk stimulated her most profound playing. The last piece, another request, Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now,” had echoes of Evans that gave way to pure Williams, the kind of inspired creativity that jazz players in the thirties called “original stuff.”
She thanked the audience, bowed and left the stage to a standing ovation, not of the knee-jerk variety that has been sweeping the land, but one motivated by artistry. Called back, Williams spoke about Erroll Garner, identified him as one of her heroes and cautioned her listeners never to take him for granted as a mere entertainer but to realize that he was “a great pianist and a great musician.” Then she went back to the Steinway and played a two-and-a-half-minute encore, “Body and Soul” (“Not in D-flat, but E-flat,” she said). Except for the key change, it was Garner circa 1951, to the life.