Live jazz is risky business, to say the least.\u00a0 The jazz artist constantly struggles to find that perfect balance between improvisation and arrangement, chaos and order.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
For the contemporary jazz musician — that is, the musician purposely influenced by both jazz history and the popular music of his or her time — playing live is an even more dangerous prospect.\u00a0 Who are they trying to appease?\u00a0 The traditionalists who will hound you for being too avant-garde<\/i>?\u00a0 Or the experimentalists who will say you are not daring enough?\u00a0 And at what point is it acceptable for the artist to reach beyond their audience\u2019s sensibilities?\u00a0 These conflicts oft account for lackluster performances, for improvisation may foster questionable choices.\u00a0 On the flipside, there are times when a jazz performance is so engaging, so soulful and so intricately spontaneous (a juxtaposition, I know) that it almost seems impossible to match.\u00a0 Such is the performance captured on David Sanborn\u2019s Live At Montreux, 1984. The DVD hits it off with an aggressively funky but irresistibly melodic tune named \u201cHideaway,\u201d entrapping the audience with remnants of Grover Washington and Chuck Mangione.\u00a0 These remnants, although powerful, do not last long.\u00a0 Through audacious arrangement and key modulations, \u201cHideaway\u201d explodes into an exciting form of punk jazz.\u00a0 Alto saxophonist Sanborn and his crew (Larry Willis on keyboards, Hiram Bullock on guitar, Tom Barney on bass and Buddy Williams on drums) consistently increase the intensity from there with a coherent mix of invention and tradition, from the progressive \u201cSmile\u201d to a beautiful rendition of the jazz standard \u201cAutumn Leaves,\u201d featuring Rickie Lee Jones (\u201cChuck E\u2019s In Love\u201d) on vocals.\u00a0 <\/p>\n The shining star of the DVD is \u201cStraight To The Heart,\u201d a soulful R&B ballad turned head-bobbing funk tune that features Sanborn throughout.\u00a0 The rhythm section, particularly Bullock\u2019s guitar and Barney\u2019s bass, lock in like synchronized swimmers, following each other with immaculate precision.\u00a0 Sanborn is the perfect mixture of Charlie Parker and Prince.\u00a0 He creates an alto sax sound that emulates the sensuality of a falsetto gospel voice as contrived by a skilled bebop interpolator.\u00a0 This song is as perfect as I can imagine a song being.<\/p>\n But the most impressive of Sanborn\u2019s achievements on this DVD is not his proven musicianship but how he, as a bandleader, lets the other musicians partake in this glory.\u00a0 They sound like a band\u2014not just four musicians behind a star. Sanborn, whose side credits include David Bowie and Gil Evans, lets his contemporaries shine as we are graced with two lengthy, unaccompanied instrumental solos from Bullock and Willis, respectively.\u00a0 Both these solos exhibit mastery of improvisation and arrangement.\u00a0 And while both solos are far too elaborate to detail in this short article, no amount of words could express their emotional magnitude.\u00a0 If a painting is worth a thousand words, these solos are worth a thousand paintings.\u00a0 And on top of this\u2014yes, there is more to brag about\u2014the stage presence of this band is unbelievable, thanks mostly to the manic dancing of a barefoot Hiram Bullock.\u00a0 If Jimi Hendrix would have ventured into jazz, Hiram Bullock might have been what he looked like on stage.<\/p>\n In Live at Montreux, 1984, <\/i>Sanborn and crew find what jazz musicians constantly seek: a perfect balance of chaos and order, homage to tradition and experimentation and an exciting but challenging rapport with the audience.\u00a0 This is punk jazz at its best\u2014a musical marriage of discord and assortment that must be experienced to be believed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":29767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[8351],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-41374","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-david-sanborn","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41374"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41374"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}