Mulgrew Miller goes his own creative way

The word that kept coming to mind during pianist Mulgrew Miller’s performance at the Jazz Bakery was “craftsmanship.” The feeling that kept surfacing was pure, unadulterated dynamism.

Miller’s great strength is his capacity to combine those two seemingly disparate qualities – beautifully articulated improvisations that constantly stimulate one’s intellectual response, combined with the power to generate irresistible surges of sheer emotional force. The 51-year-old Mississippi-born pianist has had ample opportunity to create his well-rounded musical persona. Any rhythm section player whose resume includes gigs with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Betty Carter, Tony Williams, Art Blakey and Joe Henderson (among numerous others) has to have an open-door musical perspective. And Miller has kept the best of the lessons learned in each of those experiences.

Working with bassist Ivan Taylor and drummer Rodney Green, his program varied from standards such as “If I Should Lose You” and “You and the Night and the Music” to Dizzy Gillespie’s bop classic “Woody’n You” and Miller’s own lyrical waltz “From Day to Day.”

He repeatedly danced past expectations. Beginning “If I Should Lose You,” for example, with a floating, impressionistic solo passage, he kicked into a driving rhythm, transforming this perennial tear-jerker into a rocketing vehicle for improvisation. His incredibly mobile right hand, scurrying through one bop-inflected lick after another, took the spotlight in the Gillespie piece, making way for lush harmonic layering in “From Day to Day.”

Miller, for the most part, remained well within his own creative persona, enhancing it with subtle flavors from his Southern roots, delivering it with the precision of his first pianistic inspiration, Oscar Peterson.

He was generally well-aided by his associates, with Taylor’s bass lines flowing in deep, supportive fashion. There was a less dependable array of interaction between Miller and drummer Green. The more subtle moments, in which Green’s gentle percussive strokes enhanced ballad passages, were impressively atmospheric. Less rewarding were the more fast-paced segments, in which piano and drums appeared to compete rather than share a unified creative momentum.