Sight and Sound: Jazz

For three years, Quincy House has performed a rare service: it has given jazz-starved Harvard an evening of jazz, and it has given the College's neglected musicians and dancers a chance to perform.

No one who traipsed over to Quincy Friday night expected anything polished or perfect. What they expected--and got--was a glimpse of Harvard's lively but largely unnoticed jazz life.

Lowell Davidson, a junior, contributed a provocative session of his own trio. In his first three compositions, he experimented broadly with time and abandoned the "rhythm section" concept to let bassist Kent Cavler and drummer Bill Elgart improvise as freely as he himself did on piano. The consistent mood of the three pieces was desolation; and the freedom of Davidson's sidemen to go their own ways accentuated the loneliness and solemnity of the music.

In his fourth composition ("as yet untitled"), Davidson muted his jarring stop-and-start rhythms and created a gentler, more peaceful aura. He ended his set with a playful, frantic, ironic version of Miles Davis'Milestones. Though he sometimes sounded chaotic, Davidson is no musical anarchist; his compositions were carefully patterned. But now and then his self-imposed experimental conventions seemed to hobble his imagination.

Another junior, Mike Tschudin, was ubiquitous: his five-man ensemble played three sets of his own compositions and he wrote the music for two of the Jazz Dance Workshop's four sequences. Tschudin showed himself to be a skillful, full-handed pianist, but his music lacked real emotional impact. His quintet played pleasant, solid jazz when its members felt themselves able to swing freely. But they couldn't stay together when they played from sheet music; the pieces of paper diverted their attention from each other.

The quality of Bob Walsh's Jazz Dance Workshop varied inversely with the number of dancers on stage. In Leonard Bernstein's First Glimpse, a horde of girls stood in place going through fairly standard motions: swinging hips, snapping fingers, waving arms. In a "pas de trois" danced to Richard Rogers' My Favorite Things, only Carol Schectman. Linda Townsend and Walsh occupied the stage, and theirs was the most relaxed and technically the best dance performance of the evening. Miss Schectman especially moved with great ease and grace.