Saturday, 4:10 p.m. — The Night Club/Bill Berry Stage
Down at the teeming Night Club, the Rashied Ali Quintet has worked itself into a frenzy, the air pulsing with raw electric energy from Lawrence Clark’s tenor saxophone. Condensing into a tunneling postbop burn, the ensemble greases the skids for Josh Evans’s ringing trumpet solo as a knot of young hepcats standing in the back of the room looks on and nods. The conflagration on stage soon spreads to ignite Greg Murphy’s piano, which cuts through a maze of maddeningly fast notes like a laser beam.
Smiling, Ali drives the breakneck pace from his drum kit. But it seems to be less a matter of his pushing the band than of pulling them up to his natural pace. Lifting off into a solo of his own, Ali tempers the thunder with prodding, exploratory pauses, as if seeking to define the underlying structure of his titanic rhythms.
After a workout lasting the better part of half an hour, the band quickly calms things down for “You’re Reading My Mind,” a mysterious ballad by bassist Joris Teepe. Formed by layers of melancholy, Teepe’s solo on this tune carries a tenderness that might have seemed impossible only minutes before.
“Judgment Day,” another 30-minute epic, enters with a simple fanfare before launching into a hard 1960s-style thrust. Again the intensity rises to shattering levels, and the dynamite horn solos soon form a sort of force field around the Night Club stage, making everything outside seem almost irrelevant.
