Six musicians, three sets. The only band in town playing hard bop on a regular basis. The idea came from Don Wilner, the distinguished bassist, bandleader, and sideman who, as the Cafe's musical director since early 1995, has pretty much been given free rein to program anything he wants, seven nights a week. "I thought about it in June, and I put the band down for two nights to see how it went," Wilner says. "The first night we played, it went great. After that I began to realize it was a good idea to do more."
So Wilner soon increased the hard-bop gigs to three Thursdays a month and the occasional weekend. His instinct to use more musicians than the club's usual duo or trio was on target. "The music usually involves two or three horns, and I wanted to start using more horns because I think that's a sign of a real good jazz club," he explains. "Basically our nights have been dominated by piano trios with a singer or one horn. I wanted that sound of horns playing in harmony. It just has more impact. It's a typical sound you would associate with a jazz club."
The high level of musicianship at the Van Dyke definitely puts it in the league of some of the best jazz clubs in the country, but it does differ in one respect: the cover charge. For a mere three dollars on Thursday and six on the weekend (though that amount is soon going to rise slightly), audience members can spend three hours listening to some of Miami's most outstanding players.
The band is composed of Wilner himself on upright bass and five other first-rate musicians with whom he has worked on and off for many years: drummer James Martin and pianist Mark Marineau (on other nights they perform as the Don Wilner Trio); Pete Minger, a former soloist with the Count Basie Orchestra, on trumpet; and Dave Hubbard, who has performed with cats such as Ray Charles and George Benson, on tenor saxophone. Alto saxophonist by night and bailiff during the day Jesse Jones, Jr., who last year released the well-received CD Soul Serenade on the Berkeley, California-based jazz label Fantasy Records, rounds out the sextet.
Their sound is expectedly jazzy and surprisingly pleasant. Make no mistake, the "bop" in hard bop is not that of the bebop variety. That style of music -- relentless, bombastic, to some inscrutable -- marked a boundary-stretching moment in jazz history during the Forties when it seemed there was nowhere else to go but crazy. Bebop flourished in the 52nd Street nightclubs of New York City, a major center of musical experimentation. It summons images of trumpet virtuoso Dizzy Gillespie and alto sax whiz Charlie Parker honking and blowing, improvising over frenetic chord changes, transforming and sometimes transcending melody by twisting, turning, and expanding. The playing was complicated and technically impressive, yet unlistenable for many; the style eventually prompted a more accessible alternative -- hard bop.
"Bebop was sort of scientific and theoretical music," says Wilner, "and hard bop was a reaction to that. Although it contains elements of bebop, it also has other things that make it easy to tap your foot to or sing along with. I've been finding out that a lot of people are afraid the music is going to be like bebop -- loud and obnoxious. But hard bop is really bebop taken not a step further, but a step to the side."
Hence the sound -- bold, boisterous, a smoothing-out of its rough-edged predecessor blended with a smidgen of blues and a splash of gospel. The rhythm section does more than complacently keep the beat: It pounds out syncopated three- and four-beat patterns, often lasting several measures, weaving a musical tapestry on which soloists can improvise melodies.
At the height of its popularity in the mid- to late Fifties, hard bop was played most successfully by drummer Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers, and by the likes of alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, drummer Max Roach, and trumpeters Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown, and Miles Davis. That was mainly on the East Coast; on the West Coast cool jazz (think Dave Brubeck's "Take Five") prevailed. Hard bop faded in the early Seventies as musicians grew bolder and drifted into free jazz, post-bop, and fusion, and incorporated diverse influences such as rock and funk.
