high, hot, and fast

Aug. 30, 2002 performance, reviewed by Dave Conlin Read

After an opening number that came in high, hot, and fast and went out with a crazy coda of trumpet and sax that was like an elaborate flourish under a signature, Arturo Sandoval played a number that seemed the musical equivalent of Ulysses and The Sound and The Fury for its breadth, depth, and range of voices.

Sandoval's aural tome began with some honking talk through his muted trumpet; starting out with a call-and-response feel, then the impression was of a man talking to himself out loud.

Several minutes into it, I imagined that he had taken on the persona of an ordinary working man who had been struck brilliant by the gods: maybe a janitor alone in a music hall hours after a concert he'd perhaps heard bits of from the boiler room, and as he sets about to cleaning up he takes up some tool of his trade and feigns the motions of a musician, and he hears music, so he does it again and there's more music, and so he's off - he's cleaning up/he's making music, increasingly beautiful music, he's working hard, he's working happy, he's working as if this is the only chance he's ever going to have to make such beautiful noise with the magical instrument and so he explores every facet of it, blowing high and low, blue and bright, soft and harsh, fast and slow.

And then, yes, and then...he lays aside the magic instrument, as if to take the measure of his trance, and finds that it is boundless as he becomes the singer and the piano player and guitar and percussion and most amusingly, master of the giant double bass, which he rises on tip-toe and stretches high as he can to adjust the tuning of.

We're in the midst of an astounding bit of scat-singing and mime, and this segment of the epic closes when Sandoval picks up another real instrument, the Jew's harp, with which he creates a resonating rhythm that transfers to his real bandmates the thrall that had over-taken him.

While the band carries the song, with the piano in prominence, Sandoval ambles over to the railing for a quick visit with front row fans before he returns front and center, picks up his trumpet and mute and puts the wrap on his fantastic adventure.

Afterwards, by way of taking a breather, he paid tribute to the venue, needled the schedulers for not having him back sooner, talked about his mentor Dizzy Gillespie, and introduced the piano portion of his set which was to follow, featuring tunes from his new release, "My Passion for the Piano."

The set included a brilliant tune called Oscar, dedicated to his hero Oscar Peterson. (He owns an Imperial model Bösendorfer piano, which is nine-and-a-half feet long and has ten extra keys.) Sandoval said that he was supposed to be playing the song for Peterson in Philadelphia the next day but the gig wouldn't happen because of a screw-up by the promoter.