The Magic of Miles Davis
National Arts Centre, Fourth Stage
Saturday, February 12, 2005

As the first performance in his planned series Impressions in Jazz , local bassist Adrian Cho bit off a large chunk by not only attempting to recreate legendary trumpeter Miles Davis' mid-'60s Quintet with saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams, and the late '50s sextet that recorded, amongst other things, the classic Kind of Blue ; he also strove to recreate the '49 recording The Birth of the Cool by putting together a nonet with the same instrumentation as the now infamous and first-recorded collaboration between Miles and noted arranger Gil Evans. The results of this ambitious undertaking, which took place in the comfort of Ottawa's National Arts Centre's Fourth Stage, a room that has the intimacy of a small club (without the smoke), was engaging and also largely successful from a musicological perspective. Cho, a solid bassist with a disposition towards instrumental purity — using gut strings and no amplification — insisted on minimal miking of the various-sized ensembles, relying, instead, on each group to self-regulate its own mix.

Mention must be made of Cho's extensive programme notes — that not only described the Impressions in Jazz series and its ambitions, but placed the three ensembles in historical musical perspective, and provided informative descriptions of all compositions being played. Cho's intentions were clearly to educate as much as entertain, and he succeeded on both fronts.

Starting with the '60s material and working chronologically backwards in time, Cho was joined, for the first half of the first set, by trumpeter Jean Trudel, tenor saxophonist Brian Magner, pianist John Roney and drummer Jim Doxas. No surprise to anyone who saw him perform with bassist John Geggie and saxophonist Mike Murley on the same stage last year, Doxas created much of the excitement of the quintet's treatment of material including Carter's "Eighty-One," Shorter's "Pinocchio" and "Prince of Darkness," Hancock's "Little One," Williams' "Pee Wee" and the Victor Feldman staples "Joshua" and "Seven Steps to Heaven." Doxas, normally based in Montreal, played with the kind of unbridled energy that paid tribute to Williams without strictly imitating him, demonstrating a similar ability to punctuate the music with motifs that were anything but non sequiturs.

Roney, also from Montreal, has spent a lot of time playing with Doxas and it shows. The obvious comfort level and communication between the two was in clear evidence, especially when the quintet broke down into a trio for solos from Roney, and was responsible for many of the most magical moments of the night. Roney's style clearly comes from the Hancock/Evans school, but his clear harmonic command and sense of composition in his solos meant that he, perhaps more so than anyone else, was able to take the material in new directions — which is what the mid-'60s quintet was, after all, all about.

Magner, a fixture on the local R&B scene for many years, is a relative newcomer to this kind of music, and he's clearly doing his homework. While he still has a ways to go in terms of comfortably playing through the changes, rather than to them, what he lacked in Roney's harmonic sophistication he more than made up for with a rich and robust tone, a terrific set of ears that had him interacting with the players around him, and an economical sense of style that clearly worked in terms of echoing the similarly concise and spare Shorter. Smiling often and providing the kind of eye contact and encouragement to the others that demonstrated just how plain happy he was to be there, Magner was second only to Doxas in terms of having a vibrant and commanding physical presence on stage.

Sadly, Trudel was the weak link. Granted, filling Miles Davis' shoes is a tall order for anyone; but while Trudel was capable at navigating the themes, when it came to solos he had an appealing enough tone and sense of space, but lacked the kind of immediacy and presence that was really required, especially for the more exploratory nature of the mid-'60s quintet. He seemed to approach solos as distinct spaces for himself rather than points of interaction with the rest of the group.

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