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Daring to Take a Chisel to Two Monuments of Jazz

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Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and John Coltrane's Giant Steps may be the most fetishized jazz records in the last 50 years, and this year they both turn exactly 50.

The saxophonists, George Garzone, Ted Nash, Sherman Irby and Walter Blanding Jr. Backing them, bassist Ivan Taylor, and the drummers Rodney Green and Jimmy Cobb.

A Jazz at Lincoln Center concert in their honor is almost something to dread: not necessarily because the records are technically beyond reach, but because such an event can quickly become a knowing lob to the fetishizers. Beneath their imposing auras the cool of Kind of Blue, the iron discipline of Giant Steps lie all sorts of wily suggestions. The albums don't need respectful glosses, performances that harden them into the status of luxury goods; they need challenging and taking apart. And Thursday nights concert at Rose Theater, built around the albums (and repeated on Friday), did that rather elegantly.

Giant Steps came first. Its a quartet record, but in front of the three rhythm-section players the pianist Mulgrew Miller, the bassist Ivan Taylor and the drummer Rodney Green were arrayed four saxophonists. This was already a good sign. In radical rearrangements of the pieces, the horns played bits of transcribed, harmonized Coltrane improvisations (in Countdown); they expanded on ideas that were already there. (Three of the saxophonists Ted Nash, Sherman Irby and Walter Blanding Jr. took up flutes to play the childlike melody in the theme of Syeedas Song Flute.) They improvised individually, then became a saxophone choir in a way that had nothing to do with Coltrane per se but illuminated certain passages of the songs.

And in Giant Steps itself, Coltrane's harmonic steeplechase tude, the band took special pains to play with expectations, flickering between a ballad tempo and the tunes proper fast pace. But all through the set were surprises: solos, duos, four-way collective improvising, bass-clarinet interludes. With disparate phrasing and tone, the saxophonists varied the moods, and where they actually tried to replicate Coltrane's loud, hard cry, they chose carefully.

That keening almost always came from the fourth saxophonist, George Garzone, who could reproduce it without seeming glib, through a real understanding of Coltrane's improvising strategies and his own modest gusto. It was good to hear, even better because he offered only a taste of it.

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