Strings Attached

By BRUCE HANDY

Strings occupy a special, not particularly exalted place in jazz, their use generally signifying either a descent into pop schlock or an ill-advised stab at European art-music "legitimacy." Or, in the worst cases, a truly appalling amalgamation of the two. Charlie Parker's recordings with strings are probably the genre's acme. With their mostly undistinguished arrangements backing the saxophonist as if he were a B-list crooner, the sessions have long been dismissed by jazzbos as being beneath his talents. But he himself was proud of them, and listeners today, accustomed to the burr-in-your-ear juxtapositions of hip-hop and electronica, may find something bracing in the sheer sound of these records, a pleasing shiver in hearing Parker's acerbic horn cutting against the schmaltzy grain of massed violins. Then again, this may be a minority opinion.

Fusion and "smooth" jazz certainly haven't burnished strings' reputation. But with the music's more ambitious players looking for ways to broaden jazz's sonic palette after a decade dominated by neotraditionalism, strings are back (the hipster vogue for lounge music probably hasn't hurt). The boomlet began with last year's McCoy Tyner recording of Burt Bacharach tunes--an appropriate enough context--and continues with new albums by Wynton Marsalis and the 29-year-old Puerto Rican-born tenor saxophonist David Sanchez, both on Columbia. Marsalis' record, The Midnight Blues: Standard Time Vol. 5, is his first standards album since 1991 (despite the title, it's only his fourth overall). After ambitious but sometimes strained projects like last year's 3-CD recording of his Pulitzer-prizewinning oratorio, Blood on the Fields, and a jazz reworking of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat with which Marsalis was touring the country the past two weeks, it's a relief to hear him relaxed and just playing for a change. With his unrivaled command of tone and phrasing, his Louis Armstrong-like ability to set up a sustained note so that it hits a dramatic sweet spot, Marsalis' trumpet is particularly voicelike in its expressiveness--for him, a "with strings" outing is almost a natural. At times Robert Freedman's arrangements buoy him tastefully; at others they egg the normally cerebral player on to romantic abandon. It's the best sort of marriage between pop warmth and jazz brains.

The Sanchez album, Obsesion, is more of an ensemble piece. As a player, he seems most excited by rhythmic ideas; the tunes are Latin standards from Puerto Rico, Cuba and Brazil, and Sanchez delights in reversing field on them, turning a gentle Antonio Carlos Jobim song, for instance, into a rowdy Caribbean parade. The album really soars when the accompanying 10-piece orchestra forgoes modest backing and muscles its way into the dance along with the congas. It's the kind of witty arranging that could give strings a good name.

--By Bruce Handy