JAZZ REVIEW : McCandless and Lande Go With the Flow

Paul McCandless and Art Lande’s duo concert Sunday night at McCabe’s was a perfect combination of music and venue. The performance room of McCabe’s--with its funky rows of old theater seats, walls covered with hanging instruments and direct connection between performers and audience--is clearly a place in which the music comes first, and an ideal setting for McCandless and Lande’s recital-like presentation.

Best known for his oboe and English horn work with the group Oregon, McCandless has expanded his arsenal of instruments in the last few years. In Sunday night’s first set he worked his way through oboe, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone and Electronic Wind Instrument (a synthesizer/sampler controller) with considerable fluency.

His compositions were equally attractive. An opening, untitled work was a particularly lovely exploration of the too-often unrealized potential in the upper register of the bass clarinet. “Beside a Brook,” a familiar McCandless piece, emerged in a stunning new interpretation via Lande’s delicate, filigree piano accompaniment.

Regrettably, Lande chose not to showcase his extraordinary stride piano style, but he more than made up for the omission with a crisply articulated solo on an arrangement of two spirituals, “Lift Every Voice” and “Carry Me Back.” He was every bit as good--mixing humorous pianisms with straight-ahead swing--on a number identified only as a “piece about mice.”

There were a few moments--most notably when McCandless played soprano saxophone and the Electronic Wind Instrument--when a feeling of sameness began to creep into the proceedings. The problem, one suspects, is that his phrasing has never quite moved out of the classical musician’s precision into the subtly accented flow of the jazz player. But that’s a minor carp about an evening that was an otherwise delightful musical experience.