Die Shaw wurde übrigens vor Kurzem im „New Yorker“ beim Reissues-Rückblick rezensiert – keine Ahnung, ob das mit der Zäsur so stimmt, Richard Brody behauptet ja auch als Filmkritiker die irrsten Sachen:
A live recording by the trumpeter Woody Shaw, “At Onkel Pö’s Carnegie Hall/Hamburg ’82” (Jazzline), catches him at a critical moment (albeit a short-lived phase) in his career. Most of Shaw’s work in the nineteen-sixties was as a sideman. In the nineteen-seventies, his regular working groups were, in tone and format, something of a borrowing from the drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and more or less every potent hard-bop group of the era. It wasn’t until 1980, when he formed his new quintet with the trombonist Steve Turre, the pianist Mulgrew Miller, the bassist Stafford James, and the drummer Tony Reedus, that he formed not just a group but a group concept of his own. (The band broke up in 1983.) Miller was twenty-five; Reedus was twenty; and what Shaw developed with the group was a sense of musical space entirely his own. His earlier bands were, and this is meant as praise, tight; its succession of musical events was closely packed, and the rapid-fire agility of Shaw’s solos reflected the band’s intensity. With this new group, Shaw loosened the springs; the music isn’t slack, but it’s more spacious, thanks in good measure to the multidirectional energy of Reedus’s drumming, and the added space gives Shaw room to emphasize his melodic gifts and to cultivate a sculptural sense of phrasing. In “Katrina Ballerina,” Shaw’s extravagant blasts alternate with witty call-and-response passages with Miller; there are hair-raising passages in “Joshua C.” where Shaw leaps out of tempo and back into it, lets fly with mercurial multifaceted torrents of notes punctuated by lyrical fanfares. The other soloists don’t quite reach the exalted heights of Shaw’s improvisations, but they sustain the energy and spirit; the album marks not a radical shift but a major new stage in the maturation of an original, unfailingly inspired and questing artist.
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A Kiss in the Dreamhouse