Miller, Childs Find Balance at Bakery Recording

The Jazz Bakery took its first step toward becoming something more than a jazz club--in fact, a jazz record company--on Tuesday night with a duo piano performance by Mulgrew Miller and Billy Childs. Each set of the three-night booking was recorded for release as the debut CD for the new Jazz Bakery label.

The choice to match Miller and Childs was an interesting one. Miller, 43, is a veteran artist with a smooth and confident touch; Childs, 43, also widely experienced, has pursued a parallel career as a composer.

The pairing of two pianos is not exactly the easiest of jazz combinations. Each instrument is an orchestra in itself, fully capable of producing melody, harmony, rhythm and percussion. And the challenge--especially in a spontaneous, improvisational setting--is for the players to find ways to modify and adapt their own styles to the special qualities of each other. And it was the juxtaposing of Miller’s fluent swing with Childs’ crisp articulation and thoughtful musical structures that ultimately gave the program its appeal.

But it took a few tunes for the pair to begin to find the proper combinations. Initially, they sounded like two very talented individuals who happened to be sharing the same stage, playing the same tune, at the same time. There was too much duplication of harmony, too frequent a tendency for duplicated arpeggios to blur into each other, and too little emphasis upon space and timing, upon allowing the music to breathe.

They began to find their sync with a Joe Henderson tune, followed that with the Rodgers & Hart standard “Have You Met Miss Jones?” and drove the set home with an up-tempo romp through Sonny Rollins’ “Oleo.” And it was in this grouping that the music became a balanced expression.

Occasionally, Childs played a propulsive left-hand bass line for Miller’s improvising. At other times--”Have You Met Miss Jones?,” for example--they simply tossed random ideas back and forth, gradually allowing them to coalesce into the song’s themes. By the time they finished Tuesday, their musical linkage had become established, filling the next two days of recording with rich potential.