BRASSY BOND — Nathan Mills led a four-man group of strangers in an scintillating evening of jazz.
Photo by Pablo Pedroza
Jazz is the great improvised art, a fact reinforced for dazzled Southwestern College students who experienced an inspiring evening of music by a group that had not played together before.
Like the best of Jazz, everything worked out just fine.
Nathan Mills with Special Guests was alternately smooth, uplifting, radical and heavy. A superb rendition of Freddy Hubbard’s “Little Sunflower” featured Jeff Blanco on bass and Mills on trumpet. Although they had never played together, both performed with energy and confidence.
Mills showcased his experience as a trumpet player, improvising blistering solos as keyboardist James Forston followed along with a pulsing rhythm.
Drummer Tim McMahon and Blanco improvised magnificent solos when it was their time to step out, otherwise they unified the group throughout the night.
Between songs Mills gave short impromptu lessons on jazz. The rules of jazz, he said, are that there are no rules and that every band member gets a solo.
Perhaps the best song of the night, “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” by Don Raye and Gene De Paul, triumphantly captured the beauty of live jazz. Back and forth, the melody swelled and subsided in a musical conversation between the players. It was smooth, strong and inspiring. A blind person could see the sound.
Clifford Brown’s “Sandue” was less inspiring and too long. As the musicians clearly enjoyed their session, audience members played with their phones and looked adrift.
It was a free show, but priceless. Jazz is new again every night and the audience was reborn.
