Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Beau Barry at Cafe Ballou

Beau Barry
Café Ballou
Sunday, June 12, 2011


A rail-thin man wearing wire rim glasses and with a mop of grey hair enters the café. “Are you one of the jazz guys?” the barista. “Yeah,” the musician, with a slight smile. He extracts a shiny blonde wood Epiphone hollow body from its case. He places a large take-out coffee cup on the floor in front of him, the letters TIPS spelled out in black marker across it. And then the guitarist waits.

Minutes later, a large and jovial man carrying a saxophone case enters through the sunny doorway. His eyes are wide and expressive and he smiles a broad gap-toothed grin. The tenor saxophone he takes out from the case has the hushed, romantic hue of brass unpolished. The duo opens with “April in Paris” and the tenor’s statement of the melody is full and breathy and with enough idiosyncrasy in the phrasing to cause the café patrons to pause at their laptops. The guitar accompaniment is rudimentary; it runs the chart workman-like, but keeps good time: a metronome of harmonic structures upon which the tenor can navigate.

Beau Barry, the tenorman, states each standard’s theme with intriguing lacunae and phrases run-past-the-measure-bars. His improvisations over the hollow body’s harmonics are by turns whispery, introspective and intimate or big and blustery. They seem a wonderful expression of the spectrum of the big man’s spirit. Regardless of where upon the arc the improvisation falls, the song’s story remains always present – stated though it may be within perilous, rapid ascents of notes or sweeping runs downward to the lower register.

And so it goes at Café Ballou on Western Avenue on a Sunday afternoon in the city the mystery writer Harry Keeler called “the London of the U.S.” A few dollars will find their way into the tip cup and Fats Waller’s racing and shimmering “Jitterbug Waltz,” from 1942, will have leapt once again to life – perhaps never played so well before.

1 comment:

  1. Dan,

    This is good.

    Keep it up.

    You're helping to "colorize" Chicago.

    Lowell "RaceMan" Thompson

    ReplyDelete