Concert Review | Intellectual smooth jazz from young Aaron Parks and company

Concert Review |

At the end of his first Earshot Jazz Festival concert fronting his own band, 25-year-old Brooklyn-via-Seattle jazz pianist Aaron Parks announced he would play a Dizzy Gillespie song.

A Triple Door full of gray ponytails murmured, excited to see what Parks — who'd been introduced by Earshot honcho John Gilbreath as "the future of jazz" — would do with something classic.

Whatever the song was (sounded like "Prince Albert," but Parks sort of swallows his words), it happened with drummer Marcus Gilmore's great bam-thwok beat, which made it automatically awesome. Gilmore flirted with the fast, skitter-tap dance music called "drum and bass" all night long.

It's the right groove, swingless and head-nod inducing, for what Parks and his guys — Mike Moreno, guitar; Matt Penman, bass; and Gilmore on the drums — did during the set's best parts: Radiohead-y Muzak. It might be a new genre. Let's call it "intellectual smooth jazz."

They made it from a throbbing, meditative rhythm and outright sentimental melodies — some parts of the Gillespie song sounded like the theme from "Chariots of Fire," others like "Auld Lang Syne." If not for the members' shared minimalism and Gilmore's steady, subdued knock, things could easily have gone deeply cheesy.

But they didn't, really. There were moments in the evening when Parks' arpeggiated wide-handed octave-width chords going up and down the keyboard seemed pointless; times when his up-and-down shoulder pumping (he played with his back to the audience) looked like a soccer mom dancing; times when Moreno's clenched-in-ecstasy face and "in the moment" knee bends got annoying ... but self-conscious gracefulness never took over the music.

Parks and his band's songs sounded like his new Blue Note Records album "Invisible Cinema": stately, light and accessibly abstracted.

The multicultural crowd was into it. Some came on hot dates, like the 30-something couple next to me who ate and drank from the Triple Door's date-food menu (spicy Thai margaritas and papaya salad is sexy, right?); and some on mellow ones, like the 60-something bald dude (still with ponytail, by the way) and his wife, who drank a bottle of wine in tiny sips and focused on the stage like it was an absorbing film. The youngest people in the house were on stage.

Parks and company left everyone satisfied at the early show; no encore, but some people were moved to standing ovation.

Andrew Matson: 206-464-2153 or amatson@seattletimes.com