At the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, on Monday
CJRT-FM's Sound of Toronto Jazz series is in its 26th season at the Ontario Science Centre, a unique forum for musicians. And it's not just the setting that makes it different, but the imaginative programming as well. This week it presented guitarist Lorne Lofsky and pianist Gary Williamson in what was virtually their public debut as a duet.
For decades, Lofsky and Williamson have been regular performers on the Toronto circuit. But while they are skilled, mainstream modernists with sophisticated vocabularies, each suffers from a degree of neglect, even by jazz standards. Williamson may be the finest pianist in Toronto, and playing with a precision and rhythmic bite that have never quite suited a civic style that prefers its corners rounded. And while Lofsky has certainly garnered more attention over the years, particularly through his association with Oscar Peterson, his acclaim has seldom matched his qualities.
In its first public outing, the duo sounded very good, deviating at times from the lyrical guitar-piano model long ago established by Bill Evans and Jim Hall to take a relatively aggressive approach. Their first tune was Phineas Newborn Jr.'s Sugar Ray, a tribute to boxer Robinson and an invitation to lean and wily playing. It set Williamson squarely in the ethos of bop piano, though without any of Newborn's own rococo-style markers. Williamson's approach is stripped down, with a fine balance between a consistent swing and single-note runs filled with shifting rhythmic assertions.
Other pianists would contribute to the repertoire as well: There was Mulgrew Miller's Promethean and Herbie Hancock's Promise of the Sun, the latter developing complex interlocking parts that moved toward layers of harmonic abstraction.
Part of what makes this duo work is a fundamental contrast in their styles. Williamson can sound both driven and tangential; Lofsky's lines are silky smooth, a liquid flow of long, single-note phrases, octaves and chords with sudden points of light arising in darting runs to the upper register. Given that difference, they work together very well. Lofsky is an adept accompanist, shifting easily to walking bass lines and light chordal punctuations, while Williamson's more energetic approach gives the guitarist the support of a band when required.
As comfortable as they make one another, the real highlights came when they passed through the "soloist with accompanist" stages of a piece and began to work more intensely with each other's concepts of the material. Johnny Mandel's Cinnamon and Cloves established and maintained a common ground of vigorous swing that led to a climax of rapid lines overlapping and dovetailing at the conclusion.
Almost inevitably with this instrumentation, there was some emphasis on ballads, and a few well-chosen tunes provided moments of high lyricism. Bruno Martino's beautiful Estate was an ethereal landscape touched by a Mediterranean breeze, with Lofsky's chordal playing creating clouds of sound.
It was only on Michel LeGrand's You Must Believe in Spring that the inevitable spectre of Evans and Hall asserted itself strongly, from Williamson's harmonically rich introduction to a developed dialogue where turbulence dwelt just below the surface of Lofsky's arpeggios.
That sense of subliminal tension carried over to the concluding Gone with the Wind, as Lofsky's unadorned lead gradually developed into a counterpoint of rising and falling lines.
The duet may be an ideal format for musicians with Williamson and Lofsky's particular mix of strengths. And by working together, the pair may discover that audiences begin giving them a bit more of the attention that each of them so richly deserves. The performance will be broadcast on CJRT-FM, 91.1 in Greater Toronto, on Saturday at 8 p.m.