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REVIEW: A masterful blend of classic and jazz

By John Kenyon

It's a good thing when you leave a performance wanting to hear it all over again. Friday night, many likely left the Imani Winds' concert with Stefon Harris needing to hear it again.

The concert at City High's Opstad Auditorium in Iowa City opened with three pieces by the wind quintet. The New York-based group selected a program that fit well with the piece it played later with jazz star Harris. It began with a composition by its flautist, Valerie Coleman, titled "Red Clay Mississippi Delta." This world premiere piece hewed to the expectations of a classical music crowd while spicing things up with the low moan of the blues and the sprightly swing of jazz.

“I had in mind the juke joints, casinos, the blues sounds I grew up with courtesy of my Mom,” Coleman said last week in advance of the show. “Don’t be fooled, though. The piece is classical music.”

The piece delivered on that promise. The performance of oboe player Toyin Spellman-Diaz was particularly notable, her supple lines bridging the gap between classical and jazz to give the song its most swinging tones.

The second composition was by French horn player Jeff Scott. "Homage to Duke" is a tribute to the later-period sacred music of Duke Ellington. Introducing the piece, Spellman-Diaz said Scott originally sought to write an arrangement for Ellington's "Come Sunday." He so reinterpreted the piece, however, that it became an original composition.

It was a quieter, more solemn piece, though the performers showed flashes of fire as they channeled the ecstacy of both Ellington and Scott's compositions with a swinging tempo.

The third piece in the first part of the show was "Quintette," a multi-section piece by Jean Francaix. This was more fitting with traditional notions of chamber music; you would be hard pressed to find a beat to tap your foot along to, but that by no means suggests this was any less satisfying than the two pieces that preceded it. Coleman's flute and Mariam Adam's clarinet hit playful high notes, while Monica Ellis' bassoon seemed to play in every register, most notably holding down the bottom end with rumbling notes.

As good as the quintet was on its own, the real draw was its collaboration with Harris. The quintet is in the midst of what it calls the Legacy Commissioning Project, a five-year effort to celebrate its 10th anniversary with commissioned works from 10 composers of diverse backgrounds. Friday's concert with Harris marked the debut of his commissioned piece, “The Anatomy of a Box: a sonic painting in wood, metal and wind.”

The vibraphonist, who has performed often in the Corridor in the past few years, said he was inspired to create the piece by a log drum, a wooden box with slits cut in it to create different tones depending on where it is struck. After playing it for a while, he hit upon the idea for his piece (co-commissioned by Hancher Auditorium).

He sought to create chaos, which represented what goes on in the box, through the somewhat discordant but never uncontrolled playing of the quintent. After that opening, he wanted to explode the box, in a manner of speaking, to reveal its inner workings. This was represented in the piece by longer, more contemplative sections that highlighted each of the instruments. That was followed by a closing section that returned to the chaotic cacophony of the opening.

It was a challenging composition that clearly allowed the woodwind players to stretch beyond their comfort zones, introducing improvisation to a group less familiar with its deployment. Before the show, Coleman said the group's work with jazz composers has made its members "think about it. They’ve made us hungry for it. As a group, we have talked about it all the time. One by one, we each came aboard with the desire to improvise."

That was obvious Friday as smiles broke out on Coleman's and Adam's faces as Scott gave a solo worthy of a tight jazz combo toward the conclusion of the piece.

Through all of this, Harris was a dervish, bouncing from the vibraphone to the marimba and back, the mallets in his hands a blur as he showered a cascade of notes on the audience.

Good as the piece was, it makes one long for a recorded version. Short of following Imani Winds and Harris on the road over the next few days as they bring the piece to other cities, that will offer the only way to fully absorb and understand this complex piece. It was superficially rewarding on Friday, but it was clear there is enough lurking in its depths to satisfy for some time.