Thirteen years ago Detroit pianist Kirk Lightsey and Granville alto saxophonist Bernie McGann played with bassist Jonathan Zwartz and drummer John Pochee in a searing, joyful session at Sydney’s Strawberry Hill Hotel. The place was packed and even Barry Humphries seemed to step outside his satiric persona. At any rate he stood for some time in the audience, watching and listening intently. It seemed to me unlikely that Lightsey and McGann would produce the same kind of energy during their reunion over three nights at the Sound Lounge. Both were born in 1937.
I certainly expected it to be rewarding, but in another way. And it was, but there were times on the first night when the energy had a levitating effect. On the listener and, I don’t doubt, on the players. A contributing factor was the youth, ability and spirit of bassist Brendan Clark and drummer Andrew Dickeson; but from the moment the Sound Lounge sessions began – as a trio – it was clear that Lightsey’s big hands were still full of electricity. Among the tunes played by the trio was Dave Brubeck’s In Your Own Sweet Way, a favourite of mine that has been played by Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, and probably others. Lightsey interpreted it with deep, subtle understanding. The tune combines a certain reflectiveness, even introspection, with a bar and a bit of sunny, swinging sprightliness, a small shout of joy, before gliding back into introspection and subtle poignancy. All before the bridge. Such tunes, like Miles Davis’s Nardis, are uniquely jazz. They span a little suite of feelings and resonances in a short space of time. In his improvisation, Lightsey used the sprightly section as a springboard. Suddenly treble lines and chords were scintillating and bouncing in a surge that seemed very thick through from top to bottom. It is not often that you hear a sort of mattress of piano sound inflated and activated on the instant like that. And on the instant it all cut back to pianissimo. Clarke and Dickeson were in perfect synchromesh with each shift.
After a few such delights McGann was called forward. “Our favourite!” called Lightsey, waving his big hands and smiling hugely. Indeed it is a huge smile in a singular, bony face – an intellectual face which the smile often splits. That Bernie was also in high energy mode was immediately apparent in a driving blues by Bud Powell. No one knew what it was called and I don’t think I had ever heard it. But the highlight of this set was a rendition of Hoagy Carmichael’s Skylark that confirmed something pianist Paul McNamara once said – that Bernie is the greatest ballad player we have produced. Many writers evoke McGann’s more stringent tones – sometimes likening them to the sounds of the Australian bush – but we somehow neglect the sweet round tones he can produce, the ravishing, ripe bursts of song, and the complex of tubular pure notes that are constructed with a kind of poised deliberation like an assembly of modular parts; the tiny unsuspected whimpers, or the neutral, barely touched points up high; the high notes stretched thin as golden wire; the growls placed as accents and textural contrasts on surprising levels of the construction.
Read the full review on the SIMA website.
