The Saturday Night performance in Ozawa Hall featured Hank Jones and Ahmad Jamal as the headliners.

The Jones billing was a bit of a misnomer (if you want to be gracious) or an outright marketing lie (if you'd rather be bellicose,) because in his whole set he played only five short, mailed-in solos. Basically, he served up good quality cocktail jazz accompaniment to volcalist Roberta Gambarini, his protoge and "find". And Roberta, while attractive and ingratiating, can't hold a candle to other younger female jazz singers such as Jane Monheit or the late Susannah McCorkle, or even Diana Krall (when at her best). Moreover her programming proved unadventurous and repetitive and, dare I say it, boring.

Ahmad Jamal, on the other hand was the opposite. This man has been playing adventureous jazz since the fifties (I was in college in the late '50's and early '60's and was well-aware of him). He had a superb group that augmented his standard drums, bass, and piano trio with a very active percussionist lending all kinds of exotic polyrythms to the group. It was exciting jazz, and Jamal who got somewhat predictable by the '70's sounded fresh, with a group that was at once superbly talented and disciplined, and yet spontaneous. They really had a good time. Jamal teamed up with Jimmy Heath for the second half of the set, and the oft-not-heard Heath played some souful sax artfully backed by the group. The hall came to its feet at the end of the set in roaring, spontaneous applause and stayed there for a full five minutes.

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A note on the photography. The Jones set was shot with a Nikon 85 f/1.8 lens from the back of the orchestra seats, and was cropped. There was just enough light to get proper exposure and a decent shutter speed. The Jamal set was shot with a Kenko 2x doubler on the lens at f/3.5. So it was somewhat underexposed, but shot in raw, salvageable. However, the combination of the longer lens at a barely adequate shutter speed and the required noise-reduction software makes those pictures much less sharp. I've learned a lesson for the future.