Chris Burnett, the sublime Kansas City jazz musician and relentless social media irritant, insists that the future of live jazz lies in the sort of formal presentations associated with classical music. His vision seemed particularly prescient during a performance by the Harlem Quartet at Polsky Theater on Wednesday. The string quartet’s swinging renditions of the jazz standards “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “A Night In Tunisia” enlivened an audience of about 300 that had fidgeted through a dry 20-minute reading of Mozart’s String Quartet #17. The Harlem Quartet solidified its credentials among Kansas City jazz aficionados in a 2012 collaboration with Gary Burton and Chick Corea at the Gem Theater. The enthusiastic response of Wednesday’s audience to works by Billy Strayhorn and Dizzy Gillespie indicated that Burnett’s advocacy of jazz listening rooms is entirely warranted.
(Original image by Plastic Sax.)
Hear, hear!
ReplyDelete*I must be slipping (to slightly relentless...) because I missed this post entirely.
;)