Horn, Katz, Kellaway Shine in Solos Segments

There was a good vibes feeling at the Jazz Bakery Sunday afternoon, when saxophonist-flutist Paul Horn, cellist Fred Katz and pianist Roger Kellaway walked on stage. Forty years after they played together in the Chico Hamilton Quartet, Katz and Horn, with Kellaway’s aid, were back together again, celebrating Katz’s 80th birthday with a reunion performance.

Katz, with a sense of humor to match his cello playing, immediately put the event in context with a story. Hamilton, he explained, often had a confusing way of saying things. And he vividly recalled the first time Hamilton introduced him with the line, “They said that jazz couldn’t be played on the cello, and here’s Fred Katz to prove it.”

In fact, Katz managed to play jazz quite well during his years with Hamilton, among others, and with considerable dexterity with Horn and Kellaway on Sunday. Katz began the set with a lovely, dark-toned rendering of “My Funny Valentine” and followed with his own work “The Sage,” originally written for the Hamilton Quintet. He was equally effective with “Love of My Life,” a Kellaway piece written for the pianist’s own cello quartet, and another original, “The Redeemer.”

The trio interaction, perhaps understandably, didn’t quite match the quality of the solo segments by Katz, Horn and Kellaway. In part, the difficulties traced to some glaring intonation problems between the three instruments, in part because the players simply didn’t have time to come together as an ensemble. Still, it was intriguing to hear these talented, veteran artists working to find a middle ground for their individual expressions.

Prior to the trio segment, Horn and Kellaway played as a duo, moving through standards such as “I Thought About You” and Luis Bonfa’s bossa nova “The Gentle Rain,” a Kellaway original and Bill Evans’ “Blue in Green.” Horn’s playing discovered fertile territory between boppish rhythms and well-crafted melodic lines. And Kellaway was virtuosic, constantly dashing across the keyboard to generate masses of rhapsodic sound--sometimes lovely, sometimes so lush that it tended to overwhelm Horn’s precise articulation and, occasionally, the music itself. As with the trio performances, the Kellaway-Horn duos were more effective as solos than for their capacity to find linkages between two very different musicians.