Joe Lovano is old enough to have experienced the peak years of jazz as something other than a musical appreciation class. The saxophonist grew up in the 1950s and '60s in a house where Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and Thelonious Monk held forth from the hi-fi. Listening to his own body of work, one can easily picture Lovano sharing a stage with Chet Baker and Stan Getz in the '50s or Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the '40s.
On Bird Songs, Lovano revisits the era—not through his well-absorbed influences but through music composed by Parker. Accompanied by his empathetic quintet, Us Five, Lovano applies his mastery of tone, harmony and rhythm to “Yardbird Suite,” “Ko Ko,” “Passport” and a handful of other Parker pieces, balancing adherence to the era from whence they emerged with an awareness of new possibilities of interpretation. Lovano can go from velvet smooth to sandpaper rough at the drop of a dime, and likewise shift tempo from the easy pace of cool to the fury of bebop. His scope is wide enough to embrace the history of jazz.
Joe Lovano performs 7:30 p.m. Oct. 25 at the South Milwaukee Performing Arts Center.
