For Gerry Gibbs, Family Is Never Far From Mind Even as He Focuses on His ‘Dream Band’ at Birdland

Gerry Gibbs Dream Band
Birdland
Through August 9

Gerry Gibbs & Thrasher People
‘Family’
Whaling City Sound

Gerry Gibbs has a new album out titled “Family,” and this week at Birdland he is leading an ensemble that he calls his “Dream Band.”   Yet for this veteran drummer, composer, and bandleader, the concepts of family and a dream band are essentially the same thing.

The original Dream Band was a legendary Los Angeles big band that his father, the brilliant vibraphonist, Terry Gibbs, led at the end of the 1950s. This well-named ensemble made a now-classic series of live recordings mostly from 1959 that have been issued gradually in the digital age, the most recent of which was reviewed in these pages. 

The Terry Gibbs Dream Band was a large-scale jazz orchestra, whereas the Gerry Gibbs Dream Band is a quintet. Still, it would be hard to imagine an ensemble with more collective star power; this is a band in which every member is a leader capable of filling the house for at least an entire week at Birdland: trumpeter Randy Brecker, tenor saxophonist Chris Potter, pianist Kenny Barron, and bassist Ron Carter.

As a musician and bandleader, Mr. Gibbs plays many different kinds of music. This week, he and his stellar crew are concentrating on the hard bop repertoire. This is appropriate, not least because Messrs. Carter and Barron might be said to be pioneers — or at least leading lights — in this jazz subgenre, especially as it interconnects with both the more modal and the funkier kinds of modern jazz.

However, he faced a setback at the start of his five-night, 10-show run. Mr. Gibbs took to the stage at the late show on Tuesday with the announcement that during the earlier set he had somehow twisted his ankle. He thus apologized at the beginning: “I’ll be doing no drum-foot solos tonight, that’s for sure.”

The quintet’s first tune might be considered the textbook example of hard/funky/modal bop, Herbie Hancock’s 1964 “Cantaloup Island.”  As mentioned, 1960s-style modern jazz is the lingua franca that we expect from Ron Carter and Kenny Barron, which they play better than anybody. Still, it was equally satisfying to hear Messrs. Potter, Brecker, and Gibbs — who all work in widely diverse and varying styles — playing in this idiom.  

“Cantaloupe” was hard and driving, and yet expansive. The next two tunes honored the living legends on stage, starting with Mr. Barron’s 1975 “Sunshower,” which he has played many different ways, this time steering it in the direction of a Latin clavé rhythm, supported by the rest of the group. Then they collectively lunged into Mr. Carter’s “Eighty-One,” which he first recorded as a member of the classic Miles Davis “Second Quintet” in 1965.

They followed with Davis’s “All Blues,” which is usually played as a more tranquil, introspective jazz waltz; this treatment was faster, funkier, and resolutely in a solid four. But for those of us who craved 3/4, he then gave us “The Woman on the TV Screen,” an original dedicated to his wife, and recorded by Mr. Gibbs with Messrs. Barron and Carter on his album “Thrasher Dream Trio” in 2013.  

Mr. Gibbs and his Dream ended with Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm-a-Ning” framed by an elaborate percussion solo, in which, I have to admit, I couldn’t hear any let-up in the use of the foot-driven bass drum. 

If the Birdland set was admirably focused, the new album, “Family,” at first seems equally remarkably diverse, going everywhere from jazz standards to chart hits, many rendered with excellent vocals by Michelle Garibay Carey, to more original works by the leader. As a recording artist, Mr. Gibbs favors epic presentations, often involving numerous marquee name guest stars, extra musicians — some tracks here feature a group billed as “The Texas Low Budget Orchestra” — and expansive, double disc packaging.   

Yet by calling it “Family,” perhaps Mr. Gibbs is showing us what jazz composers like Eddie Harris (“Cold Duck Time”) and Monk (“Hackensack”) have in common with high-end pop songwriters like Steve Wonder, who is represented in an elaborate orchestral interpretation of “Overjoyed.” Could the take-away be that all this music is part of the same family? 

By including Horace Silver’s “Song for my Father,” with the rare lyric sung by Ms. Carey, he’s directing our attention back to his own family — and that father who is far from running out of songs even as he is about to hit 101. In referencing both his father and his wife, he’s making it clear that it’s all about family after all.