Carter Trio simply bops and swings
Bassist Ron Carter gained his stellar reputation during his stint in Miles Davis's storied mid-1960s quintet, which masterfully merged hard bop with the harmonic and rhythmic freedoms of its time, providing the blueprint for today's jazz mainstream.
Saturday night at the Regattabar, Carter's trio, with pianist Jacky Terrasson and guitarist Russell Malone, was introduced as "The Golden Striker Trio," after the John Lewis composition "The Golden Striker" and Carter's 2003 CD of the same name. Indeed, the chamber jazz leanings of this band echo not only the classical-influenced sounds of the Lewis-led Modern Jazz Quartet, but also the elegantly blithe swing of the King Cole Trio (the band that established the piano/bass/guitar instrumentation in the 1940s), as well as the egalitarian interplay of the 1960s Bill Evans Trio.
The set opened with great bebop bassist Oscar Pettiford's "Laverne Walk." Carter stated the bluesy, stop-time theme with a free, breath-like rhythm, displaying his rich, woody tone, which was rendered both boomy and rubber-band-snappy by the amplification. Piano and guitar underlined with a spacious vamp, and the race was on.
Terrasson entered with single-note lines that built logically and surprisingly to fuller textures, passing through a bracing bi-tonal passage, a melodic bass register excursion, and an Errol Garner episode. Carter's accompaniment was dapper and authoritative.
Carter's solo was a different story, alternating swinging melodies with scribbly doodling. He ended with a phrase that Malone picked up to open his engaging, bluesy solo. Carter and Terrasson buoyed the guitarist wonderfully for the most part, though they occasionally diverted the momentum with little routines, such as dramatically ascending or descending in lockstep while ignoring Malone. The tune ended nicely, with a series of inventive 16-bar exchanges between piano and guitar, Carter swinging imperially in support.
The rest of the set followed a similar pattern, with wonderful passages of improvised interplay interrupted by arbitrary rhythm shifts, cutesy accompaniment routines, or inapposite song quotations. The result only occasionally rose above the level of a witty conversation salted with non sequiturs.
The band was best when simplest. A spare "My Funny Valentine," though still mercurial, never turned jokey. And the encore, Milt Jackson's imperishable blues " Bags' Groove," swung stem to stern, with Carter's quotes -- Thelonious Monk's "Mysterioso" and Dizzy Gillespie's "Oop Bop Sh'bam " -- for once appropriate. But it was a hushed, straightforward reading of Carter's bittersweet ballad "Candlelight" that received the most heartfelt applause from the sold-out crowd.
