Live Jazz Review: Aaron Parks Trio at the Mezzrow

Introduction

This is a jazz performance report on the show by Aaron Parks, Ralph Alessi, and John Hebert at the Mezzrow — a Greenwich Village jazz club. The show was performed on July 23, 2016. Aaron Parks played piano, Ralph Alessi played trumpet, and John Hebert played bass. This was an entirely instrumental performance.

Instrumentation and Timbre

As is typical of most jazz, the instruments used were piano, trumpet, and bass. The three combined to produce harmonious sounds rhythmically anchored by the bass, punctuated by the piano's hammered chords, and accented by bursts from the trumpet. The piano and bass are chordophones, and the trumpet is an aerophone, according to the Sachs-Hornbostel classification system (Schmidt-Jones).

The timbre of the instruments is rich and vibrant. The bass drives the sound but yields energy to the horn and the piano, letting the two duel and dance together. Mostly the instruments align in a rapid give-and-take exchange; the horn alternately leads with solo passages supported by the piano and bass, while at other times the piano takes the lead. There are great fluctuations in tone across all three instruments. The trumpet will burst with rapid-fire volleys of sound while the piano issues chord progressions before running up and down the keyboard in a virtuoso surge of energy. The horn will then devolve into a mellow, melancholy, and wistful register while the piano regroups — and then another burst of energy from the horn follows.

It is overall a very dynamic and variable timbre throughout the trio's performances, which is typical of jazz, as it is rooted in a lively, spiritual musical tradition in which various melodies contend with one another yet participate in the same harmonious course, blending and competing simultaneously — or stepping back and allowing one instrument to lead while the others provide space (Kubik 111).

Melodic Structure and Texture

There is no rigid form or structure to the performances; they are free-flowing expressions of energy and mood. One piece literally picks up, moves forward, and then stops; another begins, moves around freely, and ends. The instruments essentially play off the mood of one another, like friends gathering to converse — one instrument starts a conversation, another joins in with a few sounds, and a third member chimes in. Each participates and adds something; then the conversation ends and a new one begins. The pieces take various moods but are usually upbeat, confident, and overall very relaxed.

The music is polyphonic, with multiple notes and melodies occurring simultaneously — if indeed they can be called melodies. They are more like harmonic chords and progressions that either sync up or produce a discordant variation on a main theme being carried by the horn or piano. The melodies are wide-ranging and complex, with notes repeated in different patterns and rarely reproduced in exactly the same manner twice. The music is not strictly linear and could also be described as heterophonic, as there is not a great deal of strict point and counterpoint. The instruments seem to exercise themselves somewhat independently of one another, yet they are all participating in the same musical discourse and supporting one another in a single direction. How this is achieved is somewhat complex, but it is made possible through variation in melodic range, tempo, and theme.

Works Cited

Kubik, Gerhard. Africa and the Blues. MI: University of Mississippi Press, 1999. Print.

Schmidt-Jones, Catherine. "Classifying Musical Instruments." Openstax, 2015. Web. 9 Aug. 2016. <https://cnx.org/contents/l-DY5mRX@9/Classifying-Musical-Instrument>.