Emboldened by the commercial success of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and pianist Marcus Roberts in the 1980’s, the major labels took a plunge on jazz. They figured they’d grow the audience for a no-frills acoustic product by taking young, able players and turning them into stars that an enchanted new generation of fans would call their own. Well, more than a decade later, the labels are waking up to the nervous-making fact that the great marketing experiment didn’t work. In the pernicious democracy of the marketplace, “lite” jazz saxophonist Kenny G. rules, “heavy” saxophonist Kenny Garrett doesn’t. Now, belatedly, the labels seem to be jettisoning their “hard bop for hard bop’s sake” line and are zealously exploring every promising hybridization with genres that do actually sell records-hip-hop, funk, alternative rock.
O.K., I like a good panic as much as the next person. But this column is about not forgetting that some of the younger players surviving in this straitened, Darwinian mainstream are really, really good. And some of them happen to be tenorists-which, given the historical role the tenor sax has played in jazz, I take to be a good thing.
If the saxophone is indeed the sound of the human voice, then the tenor sax’s voice belongs to the big, chesty guy who you can turn to in a jam. From Coleman Hawkins to John Coltrane, tenorists have traditionally been the heavyweights of jazz. Joshua Redman and James Carter are the current youth division champs, but let me add three more contenders whose new albums demand serious consideration: Mark Turner (Warner Brothers) by Mark Turner, Serendipity (Impulse!) by Gregory Tardy and Obsesión (Columbia) by David Sanchez, out on June 2. (Mr. Tardy’s quintet plays the Jazz Standard, May 12 to May 16; Mr. Sanchez and his Latin Ensemble play the Texaco New York Jazz Festival, June 14.)
David Sanchez left Puerto Rico for the United States in 1988. He hit the New York jazz scene with little English and a big, ripe sound and soon enough found a home for himself with Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nation Orchestra. At the Village Vanguard in early April, Mr. Sanchez, now 29, sounded like he was playing from the bottom of a well of his own creation. He is a muscular player and his dark, reverberant tone makes you think first of Coltrane.
Whereas a North American counterpart might worry about sounding like a Trane clone, Mr. Sanchez has been immunized by his own history. He’d absorbed Puerto Rican rhythms like the plena and the bomba before a teenaged encounter with a Miles Davis-Coltrane album sent his ears spinning. In an era when Afro-Caribbean music is widely regarded as the best thing that’s happened to the jazz mainstream lately, Mr. Sanchez enjoys the signal advantage of playing both Latin jazz and hard bop with perfect idiomatic ease.
On Obsesión , his fourth album, Mr. Sanchez chooses to explore his Latin muse in a more deliberate and self-conscious way, with a collection of traditional and popular tunes from Puerto Rico, Cuba and Brazil. The large-ensemble arrangements, mostly by the Argentine arranger Carlos Franzetti, are a little sweet and string-heavy for my gringo taste, but I love the way Mr. Sanchez slices through them with his hard-toned, economical playing. The tune “Sonando con Puerto Rico,” by the Puerto Rican composer Bobby Capo, brought me up short, so powerfully did it conjure up Stan Getz, who worked a similar angle, improving against a bossa nova combo or, on the album Focus , a string ensemble.
“Lately, I’ve been getting into Stan Getz,” Mr. Sanchez said in an interview, unprompted. “He was a motherfucker. He could play anything.” Of course, point of view is everything. Evidently, “Sonando con Puerto Rico” has choked up one Latino radio interviewer and even, during the recording, Mr. Sanchez’s own bassist, John Benítez. They’re hearing Puerto Rico, not Stan Getz.
After recent articles in both The New York Times and The Village Voice , Mark Turner seems to have gone from semi-obscure sideman and Smalls jam scene regular to the jazz flavor of the month. It’s heartening to see Mr. Turner get his shot at a larger audience because he is so resolutely an unfashionable player. Not only is he unmoved to address pop music in his work-“I’d just get unfocused and then we’d all get depressed” -at his Sweet Basil debut this month, he forswore the chance to show off even a little, rarely pushing the tempo much beyond the ballad range.
As for Mr. Turner’s two recent albums, they’re a good if mixed bag. The eponymous album that’s touted as his major label debut was actually recorded in 1995 and, on three long cuts, it features Mr. Turner’s close friend Joshua Redman, who adds fire but not clarity. Once they start exchanging solos, neither pal can seem to bring himself to end it. What at first seemed like a crass marketing ploy, last year’s Warner Jams, Vol. 2: The Two Tenors , was perhaps the more successful pairing, with veteran James Moody’s furry, bluesy exclamations countering Mr. Turner’s elegant sax lines.
Mr. Turner himself is a mixed bag. Like David Sanchez, he’s got the full, throbbing tenor sound that bespeaks untold hours of collegiate practice alongside favorite Coltrane albums. (“I was a Coltrane clone,” he said. “I had no problems with that because I knew it would pass.”) But whereas Mr. Sanchez is a master at chopping up musical phrases to fire rhythmic interest, Mr. Turner takes the opposite approach, unfurling long musical lines that don’t excite the passions so much as soothe them with their shapeliness and balance.
With this scrupulous approach and with some of his tune choices, Mr. Turner proclaims himself to be at least a part-time member of the “cool” school pioneered by the blind pianist Lennie Tristano and furthered by his two most famous pupils, tenorist Warne Marsh and altoist Lee Konitz.
Tristano and company have frequently been derided as the apotheosis of white jazz, cerebral and unswinging. Some might say this is interesting company for a 33-year-old African-American tenor player to be keeping. Mr. Turner is unfazed. Like the Tristano-ites, he’s relentlessly self-critical, committed to working through surface ego to arrive at that which is real. “I feel the discipline I put in gives the music emotional depth,” he said. “You play the notes differently after you’ve practiced for six hours.”
Will it be Greg Tardy’s fate to be the third tenor, the one after Pavarotti and Domingo whose name no one can remember? I hope not; he’s earned a better fate. While Mark Turner’s approach to the horn borders on the severe, Mr. Tardy, 32, can push into the realm of the penitential. Again, Coltrane is his guiding light, and like the Master, Mr. Tardy uses a lot of high split-tones, getting a strained, even strangulated sound in his upper register. On his debut album, Serendipity , he plays mostly bluesy originals, but he invests them with a sense of struggle that has its echoes in his own life. In 1992, he moved to New Orleans to study with pianist Ellis Marsalis and wound up having to play in the street to make ends meet. “No one wants to hear you play something real,” he said in his quiet voice. “You play ‘Pink Panther’ so people will throw money in the cup.”
A few years ago, the Young Lion horn players were routinely derided for recycling hard-bop licks. For this very serious second-generation crop, authenticity may be an obsesión but it’s not a problem, even if they did inherit a conceptual outline from their elders. I say, bring on the new fusion, the acid-funk-hip-hop-grunge jazz that we’ve all been waiting for. Players on the order of Messrs. Sanchez, Turner and Tardy will still matter. If God is in the details, he’s also in the infinite particulars of the single instrumental voice.
