The great Ottawa pianist Brian Browne, one of the deans of the city’s jazz community, turned to the person sitting next to him Saturday night right after organist Larry Goldings, guitarist Peter Bernstein and drummer Bill Stewart finished their opening number.
Browne offered his snap judgment on the music. “Good for the heart, good for the soul,” he said.
How right he was. Furthermore, his assessment held up for the whole of the 80-minute set of choice jazz covers and meaty originals from the American group. The trio treated the packed NAC Studio to hearty and soulful, staunchly traditional but remarkably personalized music.
What they played was rooted in the bluesy, bopping mainstream sound of jazz as it thrived in the 1950s and 1960s, which is to say at least a few years before the musicians, who are in their mid-40s, were born.
But Goldstein, Bernstein and Stewart never aped music of yore. They used that tradition – masterfully — as a springboard for vivid, lucid improvising, both as individuals and as a trio. And the amount of less traditional, outside-of-the-box material that Goldings, Stewart and Bernstein integrate into their music added tremendous richness.
Beyond any stylistic considerations, the trio boasted a rapport that was hard to beat, born from making music together intermittently but deeply for more than two decades.
The set began with Chant, an underplayed little gem by the pianist Duke Pearson and a long, bluesy stroll especially suited to Bernstein’s warm, soulful fundamentals. The guitarist also provided one of the sets many highlights with his elegant but earthy solo reading of the melody of the classic ballad Autumn in New York.
At the other end of the tempo range there was Miles Davis’ racing modal tune Milestones, ushered in by a spacey introduction that featured Goldings eliciting sounds from the organ that made it seem like he was hailing the mothership. As fast and virtuosic as the playing on this tune was, it was always as supremely tasty as everything else that was played in the set.
Goldings contributed three originals to the night: Jim Jam, a straight-up swinger dedicated to his former boss, guitarist Jim Hall; the infectiously groovy Molto Molto; and the fiery, minor-key waltz The Acrobat.
That one might as well have been dedicated to Stewart, who before it concluded uncorked yet another audacious, driving example of rhythmic daredevilry.
On that piece and others, when the spotlight was on Stewart, you could often see Bernstein, leaning on a stool just a few feet away, grinning as if he had the best seat in the house.
Those who caught the show may well have come away with strong memories of a piece that wasn’t played. A disconcerted but humourous Goldings was unable to find the sheet music for one piece among the sheaf of papers on his organ.
But that really didn’t matter. The trio could pretty much play pages from the phone book and it would have sounded great.
For its set closer, the trio painted the studio blue with its slow, testifying version of Percy Mayfield’s The Danger Zone.
But that wasn’t enough for the crowd, which stood up and whooped until the trio returned to play Jerome Kern’s harmonically hip Nobody Else But Me, as nobody else in jazz could.
