CBC Alberta Festival
Paul Desmond still on gentle side of jazz

Paul Desmond has won so many awards for alto expression over the years that reviewing him in concert is not so much a matter of recording what he's like, as it is determining whether today's fans appreciate him anymore.

At the Jubilee Auditorium Wednesday evening, about 1,000 persons paid tribute to the man who, with Dave Brubeck, came close to making a mockery of annual jazz polls. Esquire, Metronome and Downbeat, year after year for what seemed like a quarter of a century, dug up all the old pictures of the artists and heaped high on their shoulders enough congratulatory messages and lofty phrases to stretch roughly around the globe.

And so, in this age of noisy hard-rock and fever-pitch electronic sound, the question "Does this music have a place?" is valid.

And the answer has to be yes.

But it is also beyond question that the Desmond sound dares comparison. It is pure, tasty, catchy, delicate and true. In an age of change, these unique qualities of the artist remain. And how do you improve on perfection?

Wednesday's CBC Alberta Festival presentation lacked fire, a startling change of pace, maybe even provocativeness. But many must have thought, as we did, that just this once, the Desmond ability for creating a peaceful mood, in fact utter relaxation, could not have been surpassed.

The altoman, making Toronto home base these latter years, has taken Canadians guitarist Ed Bickert, bassist Don Thompson and drummer Jerry Fuller and turned them into a closely-knit group that perpetuates music the way he insists it be played.

The quartet rated Four Stars for evoking all the prettiness needed to put over tunes like Darn That Dream, Things Ain't What They Used To Be, I'm Old-Fashioned and Some Day My Prince Will Come, and scored just as heavily when it switched to faster renditions of the samba beat Wave and the prizewinning standard Take Five.

No, Desmond will always represent the gentle side of jazz. And if being modern means anything else, he -- and surely his fans -- wouldn't care to be counted.