Kenny Garrett

Kenny Garrett plays alto saxophone with a bright, cutting tone and a habit of worrying at a single phrase until it turns into something closer to a chant. The playing owes a great deal to John Coltrane, less in the notes than in the willingness to push one idea well past the point where most players would move on.

Around that centre he pulls in hard bop, gospel and soul, along with rhythms borrowed from traditions well outside jazz, so that a passage can shift from a straight-ahead swing feel to something built on layered percussion. He came up inside the tradition rather than alongside it, joining the Duke Ellington Orchestra under Mercer Ellington while barely out of school, then working with the Mel Lewis Orchestra, the Dannie Richmond Quartet, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and finally the band Miles Davis kept at the end of his career. He has led his own groups and recorded prolifically under his own name since.

What carries across all of it is intensity rather than polish. Garrett writes music to be played hard, and it rewards a listener willing to stay with a phrase as long as he does.