London Jazz Festival
By Jack Massarik, Evening Standard 13.11.06
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/music/
"Hotter moments of the opening weekend came from two fire-breathing jazz dinosaurs. At 73, Wayne Shorter (Barbican, Friday) deserved all credit for playing hardball with a lethal improvising trio half his age.
Using only the barest sketches, including a hypermodern hint of his best-known theme, Footprints, Shorter hung on grimly as pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Pattitucci and drummer Brain Blade deconstructed his music.
Gleefully they switched tempos, rhythms and tonecentres as if bonded only by a "complete-this-sentence" kind of empathy, but Shorter's tenor and soprano saxes rode the tiger for a full hour of exhilarating tension and resolution.
The merely 66-year-old Herbie Hancock (Roundhouse, Saturday) projected even more machismo. In jeans and black T-shirt, he bounded around the stage with one of those cricketbat synth-keyboards hanging from his neck. The crowd gazed in awe as his electronic group gave Watermelon Man a thunderous stadium-jazz-rock makeover.
Of the super-sensitive piano genius of Miles Davis days there was no sign. Even sadder to say, Herbie was far from the weekend's deepest groover. That honour went to African Fender-bass virtuoso Richard Bona and his funktastic Jaco Pastorius tribute at the QEH on Saturday."
