I recently had the chance to see Maceo Parker in the Allen Room (above) at Jazz in Lincoln Center. It was my first time there and it is a really nice venue. The Allen Room is small enough for the set to seem intimate, but is grandiose enough with its Columbus Circle view that you feel like you're seeing something important.
I saw the second set of the night, which consisted mainly of funk; it wasn't gritty, old-school, analog funk, but it wasn't some fusion muzak bullshit either. He primarily played James Brown (R.I.P.) songs, but with himself as the front man this time. To introduce the third or forth song of the night, he teased, "I didn't play this one for the first set". Musicians often feel more laid back for the second, later set, which seems to give the artist a bit more freedom.
With this freedom, Maceo chose to play what I thought was the best song of the set, a straight-ahead Jazz ballad accompanied only by the keys, which were on a Rhodes setting that gave the song a voluptuous, soft feeling. Most of the funk musicians of Maceo's day were/are Jazz musicians at heart. After all, funk is an off-shoot of Jazz in the history of African-American music.
In the realm of funk, Jazz can be seen as the requisite training necessary to really prove oneself as a serious horn player. Jazz instills in its students the creativity and technical mastery necessary to play a nasty solo and think of a compelling melody or simple riff for a funk song. Maceo's solo channeled Sonny Stitt style hard-bop, with a layer of Maceo's signature funk in the mix as well.
Maceo killed it.
This was the serious song of the night, played amidst the playful funk which characterized the evening. For this one song at leat, school was in, as the title of a recent Maceo album suggests.
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