It’s a tale of two cities this week at the Top O’ The Senator. Pianist Darrell Grant has recently made Toronto his base of operations after 10 years on the New York scene; he returns to the United States as his professional commitments (with drummer Roy Haynes's band, for example) require. Now, for his local debut as a bandleader, Grant has summoned two New Yorkers, tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake and drummer Brian Blade, and called up two Toronto musicians, trumpeter Kevin Turcotte and bassist Kieran Overs.

Blake and Blade can be found on Grant's latest CD, a wholly admirable release titled The New Bop (Criss Cross), which was the source of most of the music played in Tuesday night's opening set. Overs, meanwhile, worked alongside Grant in Toronto saxophonist Jane Bunnett's touring band last summer. With Turcotte, new to the Grant scenario, in impressively unflappable form, the five musicians presented themselves in tight band formation virtually from the first notes of Tillmon Tones, the pianist's tribute to drummer Tony Williams.

Williams is one of several important names on Grant's list of past employers, which also includes singer Betty Carter and saxophonist Frank Morgan. Those are sterling credentials, and Grant lives up to them easily. You would expect him to be a deft and responsive pianist, and he is, but it's his writing that makes the stronger first impression. Grant's so called "new bop" brings together elements of hard bop and postbop, and his compositions the other night -
Tillmon Tones, Struttin' to Tangiers, Don't Stray (for Billy Strayhorn) and The New Bop - sound both fresh and yet recognizably "in the tradition."

The quintet played them with what is known in Toronto, rather enviously, as "New York energy." New York energy has everything to do with New York drummers, in this case Brian Blade, who offered a convincing case study in the difference between intensity and mere volume.

The other musicians seemed duly inspired by his example, although Grant still managed to keep a light roll and a bit of a chirp in his solos, and Seamus Blake – as always – followed his own, private muse at his own, personal pace. Blake's feature, the Duke Ellington tune Come Sunday, moved between the gentlest balladry and the raunchiest bump 'n' grind in a remarkable display of emotional and technical control.

If there was an off-note to the set, it was Grant's tendency to talk down to the Senator audience, introducing the quite conventional Struttin' to Tangiers as "something exotic for you all in Toronto," and qualifying a reference to Frank Morgan with "I don't know how many of you know about Frank Morgan.. . ." Toronto may not be New York, but it's not Hicksville, either.

T H E G L O B E A N D M A I L - March 21, 1996