Matt Brewer leaned into his upright bass, winding slowly around it as if it was a lover and he, so moved by the early fall weather, could imagine nothing better than spending the night beside it.
Their relationship, the audience could already see, was one of complete trust: For every nudge and stroke he gave, it would return a soulful, deep-bellied breath, filling Morse Recital Hall on College Street with a flurry of notes, one falling on top of the other.
Lucy Gellman Photo
Brewer swayed and shifted, closing and reopening his eyes as the notes became something far removed from the restrained concert building: the frenetic, satisfying thud of raindrops on a parched plot of soil; turning, quickly thumping wheels of a cab hitting sewer covers in midtown Manhattan; a lonely fire escape in St. Louis summer, scaled by a man on a mission.
And suddenly, effortlessly, voices had joined in: Brewer was calling from that far-away escape to Nate Smith, who answered with a breathy drumbeat, and to Ravi Coltrane, whose soprano sax shouted sweetly out a window of the building, calling to the two to be careful, it was going to be a wild ride. On the guitar, Adam Rogers held back a moment, and then ambled ahead, ready to join the others.
Introduced by Willie Ruff, the Ravi Coltrane Quartet played the Morse Recital Hall in Yale University’s Sprague Hall Friday night as part of the Ellington Jazz Series, now in its 42nd year. Ruff called himself both “honored” and “humbled” to hear the group play, a sentence that took on greater meaning with every piece the quartet played.
A lot of things are notable about the Quartet, but one stood out Friday: Its members have fun. A lot of fun, bending to the ebb and flow of the limelight as if they have been friends and fellow musicians since birth. When Coltrane played, thrusting his entire body into the melodies of his saxophone, he sent pulses of music into the audience – if not the stratosphere – that contained whole histories of sound: Charlie Parker flit through his fingertips and slipped through his spit valve at one point; a songbird with wide wings and a sweet, shrill cry flew out at another. To his few deliciously wandering notes near the beginning of Parker’s “Segment” (click the video above to hear an excerpt), Smith responded with a drum solo turned religious experience, grinning widely as he took the audience on that wild ride that had been hinted at ever so slightly back during pieces like Ralph Alessi’s “Who Wants Ice Cream.” Guitarist Rogers made it into something uniquely his own, mixing an almost danceable, Latin-esque beat into his solo.
Which ultimately made the piece – and the concert – the kind of winding, late-night conversation with an old friend that you get lost and found in. At the root of it – this necessary, sometimes dizzying web of improvisation and mutual respect, a delicate balance of intuition and ingenuity – bassist Brewer set a strong foundation on which the group could stand.
By the end of the night, the members of the 1uartet weren’t the only ones on that ground. By the thunderous sound of its applause, the audience was too.
