NJSE: Reviews: Gazebo

REVIEW: Classical New Jersey Society Journal

Saxophones in the Gazebo
Wednesday, July 12

The New Jersey Saxophone Quartet: Frederic Davis (soprano saxophone). Avi Goldrosen (atto saxophone), James Garde (tenor saxophone), Paul Egan-Lareen (baritone saxophone). Music by Gibbons. Joplin, Gershwin, Cohan, Nick Ayoub, Lennon & McCartney, Bizet, Weit, D'Rivera. Gazebo in Remington Borough Park

By John Hammel

They are the perfect group for a gazebo concert in a park on a gorgeous summer evening." Those words were uttered by my partner in life and musical crime, my lovely wife Carmen, at the conclusion of the evening's festivities by the New Jersey Saxophone Quartet. It was a delight to the ears and sensibilities to be lulled by the beautiful melodies and pitch perfect playing of this fine ensemble. Just one more feather in the musical cap of the Garden State, which can boast of a plethora of outstanding ensembles.

The program they presented was a cornucopia of musical confections encompassing the spectrum from the renaissance of Orlando Gibbons to the post-bop jazz inventions of Montclair's resident Cubano ex-patriate, Paquito D'Rivera. The ensemble traversed the treacherous stylistic waters of all they came upon effortlessly.

The Fantasia of Gibbons, an English Renaissance composer, incorporated a beautiful sense of counterpoint and imitative passages that were led off by the alto, although the soprano carried the main melodic line.

The Joplin Portrait was based on the Pineapple Rag and used snatches of the justly famous Entertainer. The quartet had no difficulty juxtaposing the unique stop/start rhythms or the mercurial moods from haunting to jaunty. At the finale of this piece they engaged in swirling cascades of sound that were thrilling.

Speaking of swirling and trading off at the finale of the Cohan Medley the four musicians traded notes with each other on the tune "Yankee Doodle Dandy!" Talk about virtuosic!

The Jazz Suite is broken into three parts: Swing-Waltz-Blues. Suffice it to say, the quartet
swung, waltzed, and bent blue notes more than adequately. They sounded like four jazz
soloists pitted against each other in one of the Basie or Ellington battle-of-the-band contests.

Lenny Niehaus' arrangement of the Beatles, When Tm Sixty-four, challenges the quartet to swing like Dixielanders and "modalize" like ... well, modal post-boppers, and capture the winsome playfulness of the tune to boot. Not a problem for these guys.

The first half of the program brought the players back fully into the classical realms with an arrangement of some of the beautiful tunes from Bizet's L'Artesienne Suite. This was accomplished with precise rhythmic playing and textural nuance. It was aptly Gallic in flavor and feel.

Whether the quartet was mixing it up in genres as diverse as jazz, broadway, ragtime or classical, their classically trained background clearly imbued them with a bedrock technique that enabled them to hit their music squarely but without sounding square. There was also a noticeable lack of foot-stomping or swaying or head shaking that is employed by pop and jazz musicians to keep time. They all shared an internal sense of pulse honed not only by technique but by a compatibility that any chamber ensemble gains from years of shared experience.

The second half of the program was a bit shorter but hardly less sweet. It started off with an arrangement from Kurt Weill's Three-Penny Opera. I thought they caught the insinuatingly decadent quality of the music very well. They didn't portray the "Ballad of Mack the Knife'* as a pop coaafection, as so many do, but maintained its sinister quality so well characterized by Weill.

The quartet's rendition of Gershwin's An American In Paris was noted for the lovingly sweet quality of longing that permeates the middle section of the full orchestral score that was rendered in minature in this arrangement.

Simple Gifts (a Shaker -- or "Shaking Quaker* -- piece) was a perfect element of the programming. It too, like the Gibbons piece beginning the concert, required precise counterpoint and imitative technique and also struck me as having a rather plaintive quality to its subdued sense of joy.

The concert drew to a close with a rendition of Paquito D'Rivera's New York Suite. This piece is also in three sections: Sophia, Waltz, and Montuno. This is a pure jazz piece requiring virtuoso and idiomatic playing. You can't fake this. It left me wanting to hear any or all of this ensemble's players in more of the jazz repertoire. They got the Cubano, Montuno rhythms right and utilized "butterflying" fingerings, the fingers flapping like wings, to gamer fast tremolo tones. I was amazed that in this piece, and throughout the concert, there didn't seem to be any stylistic challenges these players couldn't surmount.

I should mention that the quartet encored with another Joplin piece, Cascades, which incorporates cascades of notes and sonorities pouring out of their four horns in profusion and delight. This was a wonderful concert to listen to, on a perfect Summer evening, while watching children catching fire-flies.

I urge anyone to run, don't walk, to the New Jersey Saxophone Quartet's next concert. Listen to my radio show, Mozart To Motorhead, on WNTI, 91.9 (www.wnti.org) Saturday mornings 6-9 AM or keep checking the listings of Classical New Jersey for future performances.