Jazz review: Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard at the Broad Stage

Split evenly between two groups, Saturday's show featuring Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard felt a little like watching a prize fight. No punches were thrown and there was nothing less than harmony between the players, but a double-bill featuring two of the biggest names in contemporary jazz is undoubtably a main event, and the stylistic contrast between the two heavyweights was striking.

In the first of two performances at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica (the show traveled to Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa on Sunday), Marsalis and Blanchard didn't disappoint fans expecting a full plate of free-swinging jazz. With stints backing Sting, the Grateful Dead and even Jay Leno over his long career, Branford may be the most musically experimental of his brothers in the Marsalis jazz dynasty, and his long-running quartet opened the show with a burning intensity that gathered strength as the evening went on.

Entering the stage in sharp suits in line with the "young lions" movement from the '80s, the group started cooking so fast that the jackets were quickly set aside. After a hard-swinging opener, pianist Joey Calderazzo took the reins leading the group through a reverently bouyant take on the Monk classic "Teo," which bassist Eric Revis'  colored with a wry nod to "Green Chimneys" in his solo turn.

Though Marsalis spent much of his set prowling the rear of the stage and giving his group room to run as a trio, he was front and center on "Hope," a slow-burning ballad that carried the spare melancholy of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" before building to a noisy catharsis between Marsalis' soprano saxophone wails and a torrent of percussion from young drummer Justin Faulkner.

Replacing the quartet's longtime drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts in 2009 at just 18 years old, Faulkner was a monster behind the kit all night, and his wild solo closing out "In the Crease" earned howls from the crowd as he unleashed an avalanche of polyrhythms that somehow only built in intensity. When Blanchard joined the quartet on trumpet to close Marsalis' night with a twisty "Return of the Jitney Man" from 2009's "Metamorphosen," you had to wonder if the breakneck pace could continue for a second set.

Drawing primarily from his 2009 album "Choices," Blanchard instead turned the night further inward. Introducing the music midway through the set as partly inspired by social issues and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on his native New Orleans, Blanchard's half of the night was mostly dark and unsettled, such as with the contemplative "Winding Roads." A number of times Blanchard triggered spoken-word samples from scholar and civil rights activist Cornel West, which on record could work against the music's thoughtful spell, but here West's words felt more like an opening invocation.

While the set was marred somewhat by pianist Fabian Almazan being too low in the mix to fully absorb his knotty and off-kilter playing, it was marked by flashes of rich exploration. Young drummer Kendrick Scott kept the group on its toes with flickering beats that flirted with a drum-and-bass drive, and Blanchard's smoothly arcing trumpet gained a ghostly heft when he electronically doubled his melody lines over the spiraling swing of "Him or Me." Blanchard's set didn't pack the same sort of punch as Marsalis' more visceral turn, but his passion hit hard nonetheless.

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Photo: Branford Marsalis performing at the 2008 NBA All-Star Game. Credit: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images

-- Chris Barton

Comments

[Donald Frazell]

What? Kenny G wasnt invited to sit in with them?

[Cate]

Isn't Kenny G a loner? He plays alone and drinks alone. One bourbon, one Scotch, and....wait for it.........one bier.

[Donald Frazell]

Your exquisite corpse is coming along quite nicely Cate, I dont have a bier to stand on compared to you.

I dont care for language, my wife beat me at Scrabble too often so I refuse to play. Now she wups my kids on her iPhone, including my eldset who is an Annapolis grad at medschool. I wupped the young Lieutenant far too much at chess, and he's a military man?! So says i cheat, will soon be saying the same about his beautiful stepmom.

I am best at visual and auditory patterns, so will leave the EC game to you and William, I recognize I am out of my league. Credit!

ACDE!

[Cate]

Exquisite corpse? Maybe you're referring to my rotten oeuvre. I'm not dead yet, but working on it. What do you mean by "EC game" and what on earth does it have to do with William (Wray, I presume)---or (to get back on topic) with Branford Marsalis? The article says Marsalis once backed the Dead though, and that gives me hope. Rather than rip on Kenny G, you should focus your attention on ways to help rebuild Japan. Those children need hope too. The youth in Asia is also a very important topic.

[Donald Frazell]

The youth right here are my concern, and have been for decades. We responsible parents know what is real and what is not. Look up exquisite corpse, EC. WW better at that game than me also.

Simmer down,and look around. Not the gilded ghetto of the artscene and Hollywood types, but the 13% unemployment of the real LA, all 12 million in the area, not 120k of artistes. Who live seperate and delusional lives.

We are all responsible for our own first, though Americans have never seen us all as being truly US,and its getting worse. Only in times of crisis do we come together, but in between, the haves justify their being by looking elsehwere, and ignore those who are family close to home.

Japan will take care of its own, that is what a government is for. We will aid in any way they cannot. They are not destitute, but are an ally. But when we can, we help those to help themselves, and charity begins at home. Adn humility and responsibility come first, things we who are the greatest at conspicuous consumption ignore.

[Cate]

Look it up (and around) yourself, DF. It's not a game I want to play. Don't tell me to simmer down. Save it for Jon Stewart, my CC hero. Funny, you lecturing me about family, crisis and what's real, and what not. Too bad we all can't get along as well as Marsalis and Blanchard, but you don't pull any punches.

[Donald Frazell]

I know Marsalis, at least we have talked as my brother in law went to Berklee with him, close friends with Jeff Tain Watts the drummer, and Kenny G wont get the conversation. And you do play EC, look it up. I will stick to chess, but probably cant beat that old clever sociopath Duchamp. He had time on his hands, as art wasnt on his mind.

[Cate]

I won't look up something with a name like that. It sounds dead. And I'm not dead. I do crossword puzzles because they're fun. Sometimes my sons help me figure out the answers to the clues. The LA Times are particularly good, with fun puns and not difficult. You can stick to chess and the sociopath. I hope you can beat him. Literally.

[Donald Frazell]

Like all such contempt school "techniques" it is a game. They just dont know how to play it well, because they have no real life experiences.
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Exquisite corpse (also known as exquisite cadaver or rotating corpse) is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun") or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.

The technique was invented by Surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching. Breton said the diversion started about 1925, but Pierre Reverdy wrote that it started much earlier, at least before 1918.[1][2]

In a variant now known as picture consequences, instead of sentences, portions of a person were drawn.[3]

Later the game was adapted to drawing and collage, producing a result similar to children's books in which the pages were cut into thirds, the top third pages showing the head of a person or animal, the middle third the torso, and the bottom third the legs, with children having the ability to "mix and match" by turning pages. (However, the game has been played with the usual orientation of foldings and four or more people, and there have been examples with the game played with only two people and the paper being folded lengthwise and widthwise, resulting in quarters.)[4] It has also been played by mailing a drawing or collage — in progressive stages of completion — to the players, and this variation is known as "exquisite corpse by airmail", apparently regardless of whether the game travels by airmail or not.

The name is derived from a phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game, "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau." ("The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.")[5][6]