Joe Wilder Returns to the Village Vanguard

[Michael Weiss]

If you're in NYC July 18-23......

same group:

Joe Wilder

Michael Weiss

John Webber

Lewis Nash

New York Times

Stepping Gently Out of the Sideman Shadows

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: February 3, 2006

Joe Wilder doesn't seem used to making announcements. Taking the stage for his first set at the Village Vanguard on Tuesday, he looked ill at ease, like a guest waiting to be placed at the dinner table. But when he sat down, confident logic poured out of his trumpet.

Mr. Wilder is 83 and has been known for 60 years as a high-level sideman. Chatting before he got started — he was in the corridor, scrutinizing the pictures on the walls, rather than waiting in the back room for his dramatic entrance — he said he had never before led a band in a New York jazz club; he consented, he said, when asked by the Vanguard's owner, Lorraine Gordon, and encouraged by the pianist Michael Weiss.

He has played with big bands, among them Lionel Hampton's and Jimmie Lunceford's; he briefly joined a powerful version of the Count Basie band in 1953 and did some recording under his own name for Savoy soon after. But he spent a great deal of his career in the straight world. For 17 years he worked as a staff musician at ABC, and he still has a professional, responsible air. Like the pianist Hank Jones — who is a few years older and worked in the studios for a similar length of time — he is almost never seen without a coat and tie.

With a quartet including Mr. Weiss, the bassist John Webber and the drummer Lewis Nash, Mr. Wilder played a handful of his favorite standards, blues and ballads. The band cohered beautifully around him. The quartet had barely rehearsed; for sure, its interaction with Mr. Wilder — and Mr. Wilder's chops — will improve through the week. But things already sounded good by the first tune.

Mr. Wilder is an old-fashioned, disciplined melodic improviser. His clean, light, elegant sound and upbeat imagination don't lead him toward slurring or shouting or imprecision; instead, at climaxes, he filed down his upper-middle-register notes to make them dartlike.

In his first improvised chorus, on "Secret Love," he whizzed through a whole-tone scale; for the rest of the set, he unloaded one bright idea after another. In "Cherokee," he followed perfectly melodic improvised phrases abstracted from the melody, then changed to flügelhorn midsong. He used a mute on "All the Things You Are," played four-bar tradeoffs with Mr. Nash, the drummer, and used circular breathing to hold a continuous note for the song's eight final bars.

The only nonstandards in the set were Mr. Weiss's Latin tune "La Ventana" and Mr. Wilder's own "Joe's Blues." It was the most optimistic-sounding blues you could imagine.