Sketches of Garrett
Continuing evolution moves the music of legendary sax player
By JEFF MIERS
NEWS POP MUSIC CRITIC
Published: The Buffalo News
August 20 2010, 12:00 AM
August 20, 2010, 10:40 AM

The end of Miles Davis’ career is not generally viewed as one of the man’s strongest phases. In fact, Davis had fallen out of favor with many among the jazz cognoscente several decades before he died. Some folks just plain didn’t like it when Davis started soaking up different sounds and running them through his own fiercely individualized intelligence. This was rather lazily written off as “rock” music, as if anything that didn’t swing was automatically a lesser form of music.

An awful lot of people stopped paying attention, and that’s a shame. Those who followed closely, though, might have noticed that, true to form, Davis was offering a platform to the hottest young players going, just as he’d done for Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane and so many others.

Some folks might have cringed when Davis started covering “Human Nature,” a song forever associated with Michael Jackson, though it was actually written by Steve Porcaro of Toto. OK, so in the lexicon of jazz standards, where pop songs are reharmonized and turned into platforms for improvisation, “Human Nature” ain’t exactly “Stella By Starlight” or “Summertime.” But if you were open-minded, and you happened to hear Davis’ band in concert circa 1988, you stood a good chance of being blown away by the alto saxophone solo in the song — one that soared ever higher with each passing measure, until it seemed to explode into something beyond the value of mere notes collected in rhythmic phrases.

“Kenny, Kenny, Kenny, Kenny,” you can hear Davis rasp into his trumpet microphone following this solo, as documented by the Columbia release “Miles Davis Live Around the World.” The boss was pleased, and well he should have been. This, after all, was Kenny Garrett, and if he was already in his late 20s by that point, and an experienced bandleader and sideman in his own right, it sure did feel like Davis had “discovered” yet another brilliant saxophonist for us.

That was a long time ago, though as Garrett made plain in an interview posted on www.allaboutjazz.com , he’s likely to forever be associated with Davis based on the five years he spent with the man, no matter what he’s done since. Garrett seems perfectly comfortable with that fact, but with the possible exception of Joshua Redman, no one in his generation has managed to eclipse the sheer fire, passion and relentless invention in Garrett’s post- Davis work.

When Garrett brings his latest band to the Tralf Music Hall on Saturday, he’ll be continuing a trend started with Davis and deepened in the time since, one based on a devotion to constant change. Garrett just doesn’t sit still, creatively speaking. By the time he’s released one album, he’s already moved on to something at least slightly different.

Many critics — some of whom derided Garrett over the years for his refusal to stick to their own particular notion of what does and doesn’t qualify as jazz — felt that he peaked with the 2006 release “Beyond the Wall.” That album was nominated for a Grammy — it didn’t win — and was followed by the live album “Sketches of MD,” for which Garrett’s band was joined by the iconoclastic Pharoah Sanders. Already, Garrett was shedding the skin he’d worn for “Beyond the Wall,” and looking to break through to new terrain somewhere to the left of “Live At the Village Vanguard”-era John Coltrane.

Again, by the time listeners were growing accustomed to this particular version of Garrett, he’d already announced that his next ensemble would be based around his interplay with an electric organist. Saturday’s show will feature Garrett leading this particular combo, comprised of organist Johnny Mercier, drummer Nathan Webb and bassist Kona Khasu.

Something about this perpetual shape-shifting seems to speak to the very essence of jazz — or at least, what jazz once was. At its best, the form has always been protean, as if in a constant state of becoming. Those who would nail it down, or attempt to capture it in a freeze-frame, would seem to be missing the point that this music is about the journey itself, not the arrival.

Garrett doesn’t seem too particularly concerned with what the jazz academics think about what he’s doing anyway.

“I’m just an artist who is trying to come up with some music and I try not to get caught up into [what critics might say],” he told www.allaboutjazz.com . “I realized that a long time ago. If you play something that they like, they embrace it. If you play something that’s a little bit different or a little more experimental, they might not embrace that.

“The main thing is that . . . when I look in the mirror, I am fine with myself. I do musically what it is that I feel at the time. I just do that. I don’t justify it or explain it. It is just what it is.”

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Concert Review: The Buffalo News

There are shows you attend that you remember forever. Maybe the band was really on, the sun was shining, you had a decent day at work, and the elements just seemed to conspire to make your day great. Nothing wrong with that, right? We should always take what we get.

Other times, however, we can hear a live performance of music and be utterly transformed, if we approach it with open mind and humble heart. When this happens, it can be an incredibly powerful experience. OK, so music may not be able to change the world all by itself, but what music does — plant a seed that might blossom into meaningful change later, and perhaps spread like a positive virus — can’t really be done by anything else with such expediency.

You’ve gotta have your head in the right space in order for any of this to work, and maybe it’s all just a romantic fantasy anyway.

When you’re in the presence of something as momentous as the program of music that Kenny Garrett and his incredible band offered inside the Tralf on Saturday, however, it is just so, so easy to believe it’s true.

You may remember Garrett from his outstanding work with Miles Davis during the late, great jazzman’s last years. Or perhaps you recall his crossover hit “Happy People,” an instantly lovable marriage of jazz harmony, R&B essence and funk strut.

Garrett is able to suggest a universe where jazz defies its own conventional definition, though. His music maintains a protean form, which is to suggest that it does its best to disavow a strict interpretation of form itself, favoring a propensity to delve into whatever area it might favor at any given point.

The Garrett naysayers amongst the jazz intelligentsia are missing several points at once. Like the true innovators of the genre—Miles, Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Monk, Herbie Hancock among them — Garrett is after a music that defies categorization.

On Saturday, he found that sound, asked it to dance, wooed it, and then took it home.

Garrett’s last studio album, “Beyond the Wall,” and its follow-up, “Sketches of MD,” took post-bop toward its outer limits with a blend of incredible virtuosity and considerable soulfulness. You’d think the guy would still be bleeding that vein, but Garrett seems to have learned one significant thing from his time with Miles—namely, that the only constant in music is change.

Toward that end, Garrett collected an entirely new tribe of musicians following the cosaxophone meltdown that found legend Pharoah Sanders joining him on “Sketches.” This time around, the alto-man was looking for a gospel feel, one that was able to play harmonically complex material in a manner that suggested a way forward for jazz.

From piece to piece, Garrett —joined by organist/keyboardist Johnny Mercier, drummer Nathan Webb and bassist Kona Khasu—moved freely between funk, soul, R&B, Latin, African, and ambient approaches.

He summoned Coltrane, naturally, but then denied straight swing beats throughout the gig, favoring a poly-rhythmic, cross-cultural approach instead. He literally moaned through his sax while the group played a twisted form of gospel, but then pushed the harmony toward a harmonic complexity way beyond gospel. He traded phrases with drummer Webb during an extended “Wayne’s Thang” that recalled Coltrane and Rashied Ali on the “Sun Ship” album, but then merged straight into a swanky funk groove.

One felt like a treasured guest at a sacred feast. Garrett seems to have found a way to escape the contemporary jazz maze. He’s simply refused to acknowledge any of its walls.

Concert Review

Kenny Garrett

Saturday evening in the Tralf Music Hall.