DATE: Monday, April 28, 1997                TAG: 9704280036

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B5   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: MUSIC REVIEW

SOURCE: BY DAVID SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   63 lines

SKILLED JAZZ TRIO, WITH PIANO MAN, OFFERS MUSICAL FEAST

For a jazzman, Cyrus Chestnut really rocks.

The Baltimore piano player, the talk of the jazz world just now, forcefully backed up the acclaim Saturday night with local drummer Jae Sinnett and bassist Steve Kirby.

His solos built and built until the room vibrated to his emotional pitch. You kept wondering whether the piano's lid prop would hold, and at times Chestnut himself seemed imperiled by the chandelier hanging above him.

But he did much more than merely pound the keys. He was the trio's melodic and harmonic source, and when he wasn't eliciting shouts from the audience for his dramatic crescendos, he played sensitive accompaniment.

While the room, a two-story banquet hall, presented an acoustical challenge, the trio overcame this with the intensity of its playing.

This was no thrown-together pickup band. Sinnett and Chestnut have played together on and off since the late 1980s, and Kirby is the pianist's regular bass player.

The standard ``Softly As in a Morning Sunrise'' found Chestnut churning out a long line of two-handed octaves. Kirby followed, nimble and lyrical as a sax player. Then Sinnett traded eight-bar solo spaces with Chestnut, hastening to four-bar phrases toward the climax.

On Horace Silver's ``Song for My Father,'' the pianist built tension through his machine gun-style attack on a single note.

Chestnut's ``Blues for Nita'' has the feel of a jazz classic, and he wrung passion from the tune as effortlessly as most of us squeeze out a sponge.

On Thelonious Monk's ``Well, You Needn't,'' the musicians pulled a neat trick, each man playing a fragment of the melody. The piece momentarily turned into a corny Western-movie soundtrack and a ``Night Train''-style burlesque. Then came the swing section, in which Chestnut quoted ``Rhapsody in Blue'' in the upper register while Sinnett peppered his snare rim with accents.

Chestnut's solo on Sinnett's ``Listen'' sparkled with tremolos and chord lines reminiscent of the great Ahmad Jamal. Kirby then took bow to bass and sawed out lines both boppish and classical.

Dizzy Gillespie's ``A Night in Tunisia,'' featuring an accelerated tempo and a foreshortened melody, was, like the Monk tune, a refreshing arrangement of a familiar piece.

After intermission the focus shifted toward the drummer, who wrote three of the tunes in the second set.

It began with ``The Bear,'' whose rapid-fire chord changes recall John Coltrane's ``Giant Steps.'' Over a dominant-chord vamp, Sinnett really rattled those pots and pans.

The trio was at its best on Hank Mobley's ``Funk in a Deep Freeze,'' which featured a deliciously swinging bass solo, and rave-up piano riffs that could have doubled as horn charts for the Count Basie Orchestra.

Sinnett's ``Steady As She Goes'' kicked off with a drum intro propelled by the floor tom, and the drummer went on to explore the many colors of his kit. The closer was ``Abdu's Fiesta,'' a lively piece in which Sinnett cooked up a carnival of Latin rhythms. ILLUSTRATION: Cyrus Chestnut

CONCERT REVIEW

Jae Sinnett and Cyrus Chestnut, Saturday night at Phantoms in

Norfolk. Part of the Virginia Waterfront International Arts

Festival.

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