I don't know about you, but when you mention contemporary jazz pianists, Mulgrew Miller is not the first name that comes to mind. There's a lot of competition out there: Brad Mehldau, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Danilo Perez. But in terms of sheer output, Miller has them all beat. He's appeared as a session man on hundreds of LPs and CDs. Kenny Barron is probably the only jazz pianist of Miller's generation who's had more recording gigs, but then Kenny's been around for 12 more years than Mulgrew.

Mulgrew Miller

Perhaps making all those recordings was a box office virtue for Miller, because the concert hall at the San Diego Museum of Art was packed yesterday afternoon. That's right, this concert started in the afternoon, a little after 5:30 p.m. For most jazz musicians, that's a half hour after they've showered and had breakfast. While there was the usual elderly contingent for whom making a 5:30 show posed no problems, there were plenty of younger folks such as myself who obviously had cut out of work early to catch this event.

For this gig, Miller was accompanied by Robert Hurst on bass and Rodney Green on drums. While Hurst was given one or two choruses to solo in most of the numbers, and Green had his breaks (and an extended solo on the last selection, Parker's "Relaxing at Camarillo"), the trio was primarily a vehicle to showcase Mulgrew Miller.

Listen to Miller's work as a sideman, and it's easy to hear why he's so busy in the studios. He's a solid accompanist, well-versed in the many flavors of contemporary jazz, and can be counted on for an idiomatic solo with whomever he's playing. I suspect that many in attendance, like myself, weren't familiar with Miller as a leader; he announced that this was probably his first time in San Diego he was featured as such.

Miller opened almost all the numbers with out-of-time, slow introductions, many of them striking in the amount and diversity of ideas and textures. He was playing a Boston piano which shouldn't have sounded as harsh in the upper register as it did, which leads me to suspect that the miking and the sound man were the culprits. It's a shame, because it put an edge on his slower, lyrical work.

Mulgrew Miller

Miller's solo work was playfully imaginative. His clever chord substitutions, many of them quite surprising, stamped the pieces as his own. He summoned a wide range of textures and right-hand work: your typical bop single-note lines; juicy block chords in both hands; bluesy crunches of notes; and Monkish minor seconds that spiced up single note melodies or that humorously popped out of a chordal texture when he accompanied Hurst's solos, as if an entire chord were distilled to two pungent notes.

Several times he deployed ascending triplet patterns, audaciously continuing them up the keyboard without variation. As listeners tensely wondered how long Miller would keep doing that, he'd catch them off-guard with a precipitous tumble into the bass register. On rare occasions, his imagination outstripped his technique, but the invention of his ideas then far outweighed the technical glitches.

His two sets consisted of a pleasant blend of originals, reworkings of chestnuts, and more recent jazz standards like "Up Jumped Spring" or "Woody 'n' You." His approach to "Body and Soul" was especially creative. The first four bars were chock full of descending countermelodies: a musical depiction of "For you I sigh?" In bars 5-6, 13-14, and 29-30 (the measures containing the lyrics "Why haven't you seen it?", "I tell you I mean it," and "I'd gladly surrender," respectively), he substituted some radically distant chords, getting us back to the original key for the closing two bars. Miller's and Hurst's solos outlined the melody (a lot of his improvisations stuck close to the original tunes before departing on more elaborate, independent melodic flights). The bass and drums dropped out, leaving Miller on his own. He gave us a florid, out-of-time solo (akin to the opening solo), and then, out of nowhere, a slow stride chorus. He kept up the stride work into the next chorus, but then dissolved back to his out-of-time playing by the end of the first 16 bars, which continued to the conclusion. "Maybe we'll change [the title] to Body, Mind, and Soul," Miller quipped.

Hurst and Green provided a solid underpinning to Miller's solos. Hurst's solos were tasty, although at times they bogged down in rhythmic monotony. Green's solos, for the most part, were confined to tastefully trading fours with Miller. If you've been reading my reviews, you know what I think about drum solos. Green's lengthy solo in "Relaxin' at Camarillo" serves as a textbook case for what's inappropriate about them: while it had its own internal momentum and consistency, what the hell did it (or any other drum solo which doesn't make use of a rhythmic motive in the tune) have to do with "Relaxin' at Camarillo?"

As mentioned earlier, this gig was Miller's show all the way. I'm going to have to readjust my A-list of outstanding pianists; on the basis of his trio work, Miller certainly belongs on it.