Playboy Jazz Festival keeps the party moving at the Bowl

"We'd like to play a piece for Ornette Coleman," Jason Moran told the Playboy Jazz Festival crowd late Saturday afternoon.

Moran was midway though a rambunctious set with his R&B-soaked tribute to Fats Waller, and the Hollywood Bowl crowd, perhaps a little distracted by the approaching dinner hour and occasional low-flying beach ball, didn't respond to the mention of the groundbreaking saxophonist, who died Thursday at age 85. So Moran repeated himself -- and the proper ovation never came.

Undaunted, the pianist donned his cigarette-chomping Waller mask and swayed with a tambourine amid his band's woozy deconstruction of Coleman's "Lonely Woman," translating the 1959 classic and its sighing melody into a percolating trance augmented by looping electronics and an insistent groove framed by Moran's keyboards and Jeff Parker's flinty guitar. The song masterfully bridged the gap between Coleman's revolutionary early work and the idiosyncratic funk-rock of his group Prime Time, which played the festival in 1982.
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