Trudy Pitts, Greg Osby and the Organization

 

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: January 27, 2007   Trudy Pitts on organ, Paul Bollenback on guitar and Greg Osby on alto saxophone at the Jazz Standard on Thursday night

The saxophonist Greg Osby is one of the most specific writers and arrangers in jazz. He makes small-group music that can be aslant with odd or long meter, and serenely played; it’s not battering or superexpressive, but glows within its own tight structure. Always, he comes with a grid.

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But the group under his name at the Jazz Standard this week, Greg Osby and the Organization, is more casual. It’s a quartet that includes the Philadelphia organist Trudy Pitts, who is now in her 70s and an important link to the history of her city’s jazz scene. Mr. Osby is deferential toward her, and more willing than usual to wing it. In Thursday’s late set, for all intents and purposes, she was as much the boss as he was.

Ms. Pitts began the set on piano and, with Mr. Osby alone, played “Body and Soul.” She allowed a lot of open space into her playing, and she transferred some of the organ’s inherent drama to the piano: she presented ideas one after the other, sequentially and charismatically, swelling and quieting. Mr. Osby picked around the famous melody subversively, running parallel to Ms. Pitts, taking wide harmonic routes around the horn without going dissonant.

They were joined by the guitarist Paul Bollenback and the drummer Gene Jackson — crisp, clean-sounding musicians — and they started a version of Milt Jackson’s blues “Bags’ Groove,” with Ms. Pitts on organ. The Hammond B-3 is a high-expression machine: if you are not riding the volume pedal and the vibrato control, you are not really playing it.

Ms. Pitts wrung them out, going from a muted tinkle to a rippling, volcanic roar. (There was visual theater in the solo as well: the sight of Ms. Pitts, amiable and grandmotherly, wincing and shaking her head, magicked by her own sounds.)

When she finished her solo, she seemed to leave a crater behind her. And Mr. Osby, in emergency mode, started to sound more outgoing, working blues phrases and sweet, high-register shouts into his playing, channeling bits of Cannonball Adderley.

Mr. Bollenback, for his part, is fluent in 1960s-style organ-jazz guitar accompaniment as an almost classical style: the muted tone; the short, fast runs; and subtle slides. His response to this challenge, and all those that followed, was to play faster and more smoothly, using sweep-picking and extended harmony.

Warming to her work, Ms. Pitts began adding extras to songs, directing arrangements and shaping the set. She sang an introduction to “Autumn Leaves,” elongating phrases as she liked; she added a cadenza in that same song, interpolating Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus; she transformed “Caravan” into “Amazing Grace.”

Ms. Pitts had personality to spread around, and there was nothing to be done about it: the rest of the band sounded narrower in her presence.

Greg Osby and the Organization, featuring Trudy Pitts, continues through tomorrow night at the Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan; (212) 576-2232.