Variations on a jazz theme

By GRAHAM REID



When people hear the word "jazz" they think singular. But the word acts as a collective noun and embraces multitudes. Jazz mocks categories. It stretches out of them and into rock and classical, hip-hop and world music. It is musique sans frontieres, with a century of history to draw on. It can go back as much as out. Or in.

That makes jazz difficult - which, as any jazz lover will tell you, is the attraction. So here are some albums with nothing in common but that most slippery of words: Jazz.

Singer-pianist Diana Krall was one of the most successful and visible jazz artists of the past decade and she ended her first career - a conservative, airbrushed and crossover life of product as much as professionalism - with her Live in Paris CD/DVD. Her current album The Girl in the Other Room - mostly co-written with new husband Elvis Costello - announced a different, and potentially more musically rewarding career for her, and her audience.

While Krall was cashing in as jazz's It-Girl, a better talent, Karrin Allyson - less photogenic, more musically adventurous - took critical acclaim which didn't translate into sales or profile. But as Krall has ascended musically, so the wheel has turned for Allyson whose Wild For You is a bloodless affair, musically as constipated as one of Krall's old albums, and she undertakes a series of pop ballads (Elton, Cat Stevens, James Taylor) with which she can, and does, do very little. She also gets a coquettish make-over for the cover. It will win over the cocktail-jazz audience Krall once had, and maybe watching the success of Krall and Norah Jones has tempted her in this direction, but this is style without substance.

Italian Enrico Rava apparently switched from trombone to trumpet after seeing Miles Davis play, the kind of career-change which can go haywire if you simply walk in the shadow of genius trying to duplicate it. But Rava - while sometimes having a similar tone to Davis - is very much his own man. His style is warm and fluid and for Easy Living he is joined on a set of mostly ballads by like-minded players in a drums, bass, piano and trombone setting. This is music of space and focus with Rava being the leader among equals: pianist Stefano Bollani provides gracefully understated support, trombonist Gianluca Petrella turns that most unsexy instrument into a thing capable of distilling an elusive and slippery beauty. There's also a clever pace: it opens with a reverential tone, by the nine-minute Sand they are pushing towards the outer limits and Rava is leading the journey into free playing and physicality, and by the final ballad Rain they are in an almost post-coital playfulness and comfort mood. Make what you will of that analogy, but this is classy stuff which ends with a sigh.

Vibist Stefon Harris and Blackout sit somewhere between the appalling SpyroGyra and the funky-hip contemporary category. Their Evolution allows for some exceptional musicianship, especially from the vibist Harris (a Ben Lummis lookalike). But, once those spiralling sax lines from Casey Benjamin weave over the Rhodes of Marc Cary, you're just a blink away from all those noodling and scrupulously polite solos that used to clutter up albums in the late 70s and went well with cask chardonnay and a fondue. For further offence there's a flautist. Well executed - and so it should be.

The category "world jazz" is always suss: a bit of both and usually ending up as neither. But Spiro Exaras World-Jazz Ensemble is definitely Greek and Spiro is a damn good jazz guitarist (electric and acoustic). The unpronounceable and unmemorable title Phrygianics is probably very clever. With Greek clarinet, piano and various percussion it trips lightly around the Greek Isles in about '76 with one ear on a Santana album. But however ambitious it sounds, it never gets past the neither/nor divide and, aside from the elements of Greek music, it's familiar old-style fusion.

Euge Groove is a young soprano saxist whose greatest ambition seems to be getting on some LA jazz-lite radio playlist - which means lots of quiet programmed beats and music for the hair salon on Livin' Large. He's probably huge Stateside and his bloodless cover of James Taylor's soppy ballad Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight has probably been on the airwaves. But it's all rubbish, and was in the early 70s when it felt vaguely new. I imagine he's playing in the bar at the Miami Vice convention next month.

After young guys like Stefon, Spiro and Euge it seems almost unfashionable to turn up a live album by Oscar Peterson (born 1925) and hear a richness of undiminished playing. A Night in Vienna recorded late last year has the pianist-genius with his quartet of bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, guitarist Ulf Wakenius and drummer Martin Drew on a set which swings, is always thoughtful, runs from a requiem through blues to Sweet Georgia Brown and goes out with his timely and beautiful Hymn to Freedom. Peterson has often been maligned and marginalised for his approachable and often entertaining music (as if these were sins) but his gifts are undeniable and here are displayed with sensitivity and humour. He might be old school, but alongside those talking loud and saying nothing young guys it's still true: old school rules.

Karrin Allyson: Wild For You

(Herald rating: * *)

Norah Jones shifted the goalposts for jazz singers but chanteuse Allyson scores an own-goal

Label: Concord


Enrico Rava: Easy Living

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Italian trumpeter's 40-year career has gone from the avant-garde to this entrancing balladry

Label: ECM

Stefon Harris And Blackout: Evolution

(Herald rating: * *)

Vibist conjures up the familiar, listeners nod off or flee

Label: Blue Note

Spiro Exaras: Phrygianics

(Herald rating: * *)

Beware of Greeks bearing guitars and the gift of 70s fusion-lite

Label: Blue Note

Euge Groove: Livin' Large

(Herald rating: *)

Third album from young US saxist who covers James Taylor and commits a funk-lite indignity to Sly Stone's Thank You

Label: Narada

Oscar Peterson: A Night In Vienna

(Herald rating: * * * *)


At 78, the Montreal-born pianist can still invite you in with melodic, memorable balladry and musical quips for the attuned ear

Label: Verve