Concert Review

I went to see a Jazz Quartet called the “John Kocur Quartet” on Wednesday, September 23rd at a club called the Utopia in D.C. John Kocur actually got his Masters from Mason, and he currently teaches at NOVA, and is actually one of my brothers professors; which is how I heard about this show. The Quartet consisted of an alto sax (John Kocur), a double bass (Oliver Albertini), a pianist (Amy Bormat) and a drummer (C.V. Dashiell).
For starters, these guys (and girl) sounded great together. The room they played in was perfect for acoustics; having a high ceiling and the place was all wood, so there wasn’t any carpet killing the sound. The instrumentation and their blend were also great, with no one member of the group overpowering anyone else. It almost sounded like a recording in that way because the levels were so good. They played from about 9:30ish that night until about 1, so they played quite a few tunes. A lot of them were very familiar, being tunes by legendary figures like John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. These tunes also worked perfectly with the instrumentation, especially the Coltrane ones, as Kocur’s sax really sounded awesome.
It worked the way any other jazz combo concert usually goes. The band would play the head through and then one, two or all of the members would improvise, before going back through the head at the end of the tune. Through the heads the pianist was the accompanist, and in most of the tunes she would improvise after the saxophone was finished followed by the bass, and the drummer even got to take a few. I was very impressed with the pianist’s improvisations, having never really witnessed very much jazz on the piano before.