Jason Palmer: Live From Summit Rock In Seneca Village

With Covid-19 generally having had its way in recent years, shuttering many venues at which jazz musicians were accustomed to performing, it is a pleasure to hear an actual concert with a real live audience—even if the group is a piano-less quartet striving to hold its listeners' interest through five extended numbers whose collective playing time is over an hour. Trumpeter Jason Palmer's ensemble was recorded outdoors in May 2021 at the historic Seneca Village site in New York City's Central Park.

Palmer is an excellent technician, as is his front-line partner, tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, while the rhythm section (bassist Edward Perez, drummer Johnathan Blake) is generally apt and supportive. Even so, there is only so much a quartet—even a very good one—can do to dramatize a series of well-drawn yet largely analogous compositions which rely for the most part on sprawling solos that are invariably efficient but no more remarkable than those performed by contemporary groups in a variety of settings on a daily basis. It is a pity they could not have squeezed a piano onto that stage.

Three of Palmer's themes are dedicated to painters, two of whom (Rembrandt, Degas) are well-known. A third, "Landscape with an Obelisk (Flinck)" was presumably written to honor someone named Flinck, and that could well be the Dutch artist Govert Flinck (1615- 1660). "Program for an Artistic Soiree (Degas)," which closes the album, enfolds some of the concert's more forceful passages yet, here again, there is little to uncouple it from what has come before—theme, lengthy solos, coda. There is some slight variation, as on the opener, "Falling In," the first three minutes of which are devoted to Palmer's unaccompanied trumpet, but that is the exception, not the rule (even though Palmer opens the soft-flowing "Kalispel Bay" with a briefer a cappella statement, while Perez's unaccompanied bass introduces Rembrandt's easygoing "Self Portrait").

Live from Summit Rock is long on virtuosity, as one would expect from musicians of this caliber, yet short on the kind of singularity that would enable it to stand apart from comparable enterprises. That is not to say it is less than proficient, only that the all- important charisma quotient is a tad less than optimal. Aside from that, this is an admirable concert in which everyone gives the music its due.

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