NY TIMES REVIEW of Ben Wolfe's CD release show at the Jazz Standard

MUSIC REVIEW

Carefully Planned Jazz, Fit for a ’50s Soundtrack

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: June 5, 2008

The bassist Ben Wolfe has some very tight ideas about composition, an interest in combining a small jazz band with strings and an admiration for jazz of the late 1950s. Where that leads him, inevitably, is to music that sounds as if it’s made for a film: noirs, thrillers, movies shot at night with rain-slicked streets reflecting the lights, that kind of thing.

On Tuesday at the Jazz Standard he brought eight players onstage to run through music from his new album, “No Strangers Here” (MaxJazz): a jazz quartet and a string quartet, each working more or less in an idiom last called “modern” about a half-century ago. In this music Mingus and Miles Davis meet Bartok and Bernard Herrmann. And in the service of drama everyone gets along, through ominous stranger-at-the-door ostinatos, romantic down-tempo saunters and running-through-alleyways postbop.

The longest track on “No Strangers Here” is called “The Filth,” and it includes a great jazz solo, one probably worth a spot on a shortlist for best of the decade, if anyone’s keeping that list. It’s by Branford Marsalis, and it’s a manic, onrushing two minutes of unbroken thought. But it is also a red herring. Mr. Wolfe’s distinguishing characteristic on the rest of the album — and in all of Tuesday’s late set — was his will to limit solos, subsuming them into the written material.

Mr. Marsalis wasn’t on the bandstand, but the saxophonist Marcus Strickland was, and he delivered juicy but controlled improvisations, going through their arcs and resolving them much faster than he might in his own band. (The drummer Greg Hutchinson and the pianist Luis Perdomo made up the rest of the sharp jazz quartet; the violinists Jesse Mills and Cyrus Beroukhim, the violist Kenji Bunch and the cellist Wolfram Koessel were the string section.)

This wasn’t based on the classic jazz-with-strings model of the ’50s, in which sweet string arrangements could sound snapped on after the fact. Mr. Wolfe put energy into the string writing, and especially on the tense “Rosy & Zero,” with its shifts in tempo and mood, he’s arrived at a truly integrated music. It’s jarring these days to hear a thoroughly arranged piece of jazz, including a little solo, finish in under four minutes. Even though much of this music traded on old models, it packed its own dry, novel surprise.

NY SUN REVIEW of Ben Wolfe's composition "From Here I See" performed at the Rubin Museum

West Side Stories For Bernstein

By WILL FRIEDWALD | January 28, 2008

….Bernstein would doubtless have approved of "From Here I See," bassist and composer Ben Wolfe's latest jazz-classical hybrid work. Mr. Wolfe's most recent release, 2004's "My Kinda Beautiful," combined a jazz octet with an eight-piece string section. On Friday, as part of the Harlem in the Himalayas series at the Rubin Museum, he presented a program that fell more into line with the jazz concept of a double quartet — a format that combines a standard jazz quartet (Marcus Strickland on tenor saxophone, plus three rhythm pieces) with a standard string quartet. The performance consisted of relatively new music — five shorter pieces that have been recorded for Mr. Wolfe's forthcoming album, "No Strangers Here" — and very new music, in the form of a new suite written expressly for Friday's concert.

The featured work, "From Here I See," was a 25-minute suite not only combining jazz and classical traditions but, as Mr. Wolfe explained in a spoken introduction, the conceptual influence of Asian art. He noted that he was primarily inspired by a Tibetan mask that struck him as beautiful and frightening at the same time. For this ambitious work, Mr. Wolfe offered a considerable amount of interplay between the two quartets, which began with the strings before the first melody was expressed by Mr. Wolfe himself. There were also more tempo changes, in the classical style, to separate the various sections and movements.

Where many jazz events feature improvisations that go on unchecked for as long as everybody feels like blowing, the nature of Mr. Wolfe's tightly arranged program surprised even the composer when it ended somewhat earlier than he expected. With time to spare, Mr. Wolfe delivered a truly unplanned encore, with spontaneous blues by Mr. Strickland and the rhythm section that couldn't quite make up its mind as to whether or not it wanted to be Thelonious Monk's "Straight, No Chaser." Either way was fine with me.

Sept 14 - Oct 20, Ben is on tour with the great Diana Krall throughout Europe.
For information and to buy tickets, go here.