Stanford Jazz Workshop presents Larry Coryell & Bombay Jazz
2014-07-26
Dinkelspiel Auditorium
Stanford University, 471 Lagunita Drive, Stanford, CA
8:00 PM, Saturday, July 26, 2014

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[8:09 PM lights down, announcements from Jim Nadel]

1. [8:14 PM] McCoy
2. [8:33 PM] Sunrise (based on Rag Bhairavi) ξ$
3. [8:46 PM] Jailbreak ξ
4. [8:58 PM] Lalita
5. [9:08 PM] “Train: Brazil to India”
6. [9:18 PM] Bolero
7. [9:28 PM] My One and Only Love
   [set ends 9:36 PM]
    
   Encore
8. [9:39 PM] Jog Jazz
   [show ends 9:56 PM]

• Larry Coryell: ξ guitar, acoustic guitar;
• George Brooks: $ soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone;
• Aditya Kalyanpur: tabla;
• Ronu Majumdar: bansuri flute.

I enjoyed tonight's show by Larry Coryell and Bombay Jazz quite a bit, and I appreciate that Stanford Jazz Workshop is willing to program shows with musicians who play outside the boundaries of traditional jazz. Tonight was certainly pretty far out! Given that his name wasn't on the marquee, I was a little surprised that George Brooks handled most of the emcee duties, but I suppose that task just comes down to the most gregarious member of the band.

Considering that the band has a long history, having formed in 20xx, I was kind of surprised how loose some of the songs sounded – pretty much like they'd been written with only the barest skeleton of structure, and the band members were fleshing out the muscles and guts and skin and claws on the fly. Sometimes it was exciting to hear them “working without a net”, but other times they appeared to me to be reaching too far, a bit like Icarus.

The final tune of the night, Jog Jazz seemed to me to based on repurposing fhe primal groove of Miles Davis' Electric Band classic, It's About That Time, and attemting to change it into a vehicle for some classical Indian style improvisation. Sadly, to my ears those two components failed the test of integration. Miles' riff is a killer one, and when they rode it, the band sounded great, but when they wandered away, my admittedly amateur ears failed to pick up the tala, so I heard the resulting jams more as aimless improvisation rather than melodic and beat-oriented explorations of a concrete rhythmic cycle. This reqlly surprised (and disappointed) me – given that It's About That Time sounds to me as if it's in cut time, I expected to hear a tala in 8 or 16, but… no. Maybe I need to try and dig up the Bombay Jazz CD for a fresh listen; for that night, at least, I was kind of frustrated with the show's conclusion.

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