JAZZ REVIEW : TABACKIN ON HIS TOES

Somewhere, in the rich and passionate emotional energies which fuel his music, saxophonist-flutist Lew Tabackin must possess the soul of a dancer.

At the start of his opening set Friday night at Catalina’s Bar and Grill, Tabackin looked perhaps a bit more ungainly than most jazz musicians. Square-shouldered, bearded, dressed in nondescript grays and browns, he seemed the very epitome of the kind of old school jazzer whose focus is locked squarely into his instrument.

But when Tabackin launched into the familiar jazz standard “Sweet and Lovely,” a fascinating metamorphosis began to take place. As he ripped through a slow-building accumulation of the short, epigrammatic phrases favored by Sonny Rollins, Tabackin’s body began to quiver with energy.

The more intense his improvisation became, the lighter he seemed to be, until his feet and legs began to shuffle and dance, and his head tilted back, eyes closed, horn pointed forward in a jazzman’s variation on a Martha Graham pose of supplication.

Tabackin’s flute playing, especially during the atmospherically modal 6/4 rhythms of his original piece, “Desert Lady,” brought him to his toes, astonishingly close to an en pointe position.

“Black and Tan Fantasy” took him on a blues-drenched tap dance rhythm spin across the history of the tenor saxophone, from Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster to Paul Gonsalves and Sonny Rollins. And the floating rhythms of “Without a Song” generated a “Bolero”-like intensity of near-Dionysian passion.

As fascinating as Tabackin’s visual gyrations were, however, they were only the externalized overflow of a performer who constantly--and, for the most part, successfully--tests himself with death-defying dances across the very limits of his skills.

Tabackin was aided and abetted in his superb program of improvisations by bassist Jay Anderson and drummer Peter Donald.