[Dixielandjazz] JVC Festival Review Sandke

[Stephen Barbone]

Note the below review of a Sandke - Scott Robinson - Ken Peplowski -
Greg Cohen et al performance at JVC Jazz Festival in NYC. Rande also
performed earlier in the Festival with the Bix Beiderbecke tribute.


June 27, 2003

Differing Musical Bents in Tuneful Coexistence

By JON PARELES

       An armistice in jazz's doctrinal disputes was apparently declared
on Tuesday night when the trumpeter Randy Sandke led the Inside-Out Jazz

Collective, topping a JVC Jazz Festival triple bill at Kaye Playhouse.
Musicians associated with tonal, mainstream jazz and musicians
associated
with wild-eyed experimentalism cheerfully performed side by side,
without fisticuffs or stylistic clashes.

The nine-man collective was a little big band playing music composed by
its members. Mr. Sandke's usual repertory reaches back to the 1920's and
30's,
but he assembled the collective for an album released last year, "Inside
Out" (Nagel-Heyer), that included the pieces on the program. The meeting
point
for all the musicians was the mid-1960's style associated with the Miles
Davis Quintet and Blue Note Records, using structures that grew
exponentially
more complex until modal jazz and free jazz radically simplified
structure or set it aside.

In compositions by Mr. Sandke, Marty Ehrlich (alto saxophone and
clarinet), Uri Caine (piano) and Scott Robinson (baritone and contrabass
saxophones and theremin), the meters were shifty and the harmonies were
tangled and impressionistic, ambiguous enough to support all sorts of
probes and tangents. Dennis Mackrel (drums) composed a modal blues, with
melodies at the ends of phrases, that could have been a Steely Dan
arrangement; Ray Anderson (trombone) brought a roaring, riffing swing
tune with some slyly anachronistic chords.

There was humor in the music when Mr. Robinson, on the outsize
contrabass saxophone, made his way through a sultry ballad like a barge
in a narrow
creek, and when he played the vocal part of "Creole Love Call" on
theremin. The younger musicians, who also included Wycliffe Gordon on
trombone
and Greg Cohen on bass, were fully at home amid the modernist harmonies,
and so were Mr. Sandke and another preserver of older jazz, Ken
Peplowski, on clarinet. Their usual idioms were choices within jazz's
long history, not blind spots.

Sharing the bill was Worlds Beyond, a trio led by the composer and
soprano saxophonist Daniel Schnyder, with David Taylor on bass trombone
and
Kenny Drew Jr. on piano. It played darting chamber-jazz pieces full of
Stravinskian clusters and concerto filigree. The bassist Ben Allison's
quintet,
Medicine Wheel — with Michael Blake and Ted Nash on saxophones, Rufus
Cappadocia on trombone and Michael Sarin on drums — opened the concert
with easygoing, tuneful pieces that jovially posed and solved their own
structural riddles. Pieces shifted meter and mode, and they looked
toward
Latin and African music as well as 1960's jazz. One section's vamp often
turned into the next section's tune.