I’ll never forget a drum workshop I went to, oh sometime in the early 1990s, by Chester Thompson, the versatile session player and mostly rock drummer who had started off with the Mothers of Invention reading complex drum charts written by Frank Zappa.
Although Thompson had grown up in Baltimore with mostly jazz influences — from the stratospheric talents of Max Roach, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, and Tony Williams — he left Zappa to join rock band Genesis. He said he remembered Phil Collins trying to teach him a rock beat. Phil said, “It’s steady. 1-2-3-4. Like walking.” Thompson said “Where I grew up in Baltimore, we didn’t walk like that.”
Cyrus Chestnut, one of current jazz’s most talented pianists, is also from Baltimore, and he doesn’t walk like that, either.
One of a strong crop of young lions that came out of Berklee School of Music (Boston) in the mid-1980s, Chestnut is a gentle, soft-spoken bear of a man with hands so fast they literally ran off the end of the piano tonight, chops worthy of the “Rach III” (he was studying classical music at Peabody Institute by age 9), and independent rhythms in each hand that boggled the mind. Not for nothin’ is his nickname “Nut.”
Mostly though, what struck me in his outing of “Sanctified Swing” (jazz meets church) at Gaillard Auditorium tonight with a sextet was his pure lyrical grace on the keyboard — in his arrangement of “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” (which also had great wall-destroying trumpet blasts), solo piano rendition of “How Great Thou Art,” and original tunes. I’d go into each tune but you can get the CDs (as he urged the audience to do). Chestnut is a formidable solo pianist. He is player of choice with the Lincoln Center Jazz Band, Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, etc.
To his regular trio of Dezron Douglas (bass) and Neal Smith (drums), he added soprano and tenor sax whiz James Carter and trumpetmeister Curtis Taylor for death-defying stretches of the ranges of their instruments — squawks, blats and the thinnest, breathiest high notes — and fine muscial conversation. And he brought out singer Carla Cook, who was lovely on one of Duke Ellington’s sacred songs.
He asked the appreciative audience to abandon “concert etiquette” and stomp, clap and sing. “We want you to leave happier than when you came in.” They did, although Gaillard being Gaillard, sound in the mezzanine cheap seats (where I was) was great, and sound downstairs was, in places, a muddled mess. I could talk about Smith (I love good drummers) but let’s just say he was cooking with the lid on and doing a mighty fine job of it.
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