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Ravi has been on the scene for 20 years now, having recorded his first album as a leader in 1997 after serving as a sideman for the entire decade up to then. There were times when he was clearly searching for a sound. (Imagine the challenge, and derring-do, of being John Coltrane’s son and deciding to take up the tenor saxophone!) But those meanderings allowed him to return to his roots through a path that he plowed on his own; he sounds like a musician in “the Coltrane school,” but not at all an imitator, much less some kid cashing in on the name.
The quartet—which also includes Gerald Cannon on bass and Eric Kamau Gravatt on drums—plays two more sets tomorrow night, May 16, at 7:30 and 9:30.
How about some props for Eric Gravatt? He deserves at least a mention in your review. Gravatt has been on and off the Tyner radar since the mid '70s. I saw that edition of Tyner's band, circa "Focal Point", and his power jazz drumming was an influential sound of the era. His subsequent disappearance off the scene was a question mark until his reemergence only a few years ago, after retiring as a prison guard in Minnesota and rejoining the greater jazz world.FYI- 'Moment's Notice' is a common tune to play, and is considered a jazz standard, part of the pedagogy, and therefore common knowledge. Its harmonic framework is challenging, but it would be a tune that would be extremely familiar to all competent jazz musicians of the last 40 or 50 years, to say nothing of great artists like Tyner and Ravi Coltrane. I would be more intrigued if they had played some relatively less well-known Coltrane pieces.