Original Jazz Compositions Shine at Jazzy’s

High up the neck, by the body of the bass, there was nowhere left to go. The notes rose with the tension until they couldn’t go any higher, until a growling sax came to take it away.

That’s how the Avery Wyman Quartet delivered the Bobby Timmons-written, Art Blakey-popularized ​“Moanin’” Saturday evening at Jazzy’s Cabaret.

Jazzy’s, named for owner Jason Watts’s daughter, is a New Orleans-style music-and-dinner spot in Ninth Square, where the low-lit orange stucco walls are decorated with gilt-framed paintings and sleeves of Watts’s favorite albums. 

Avery Wyman, an NYU jazz student, is originally from Old Lyme. He called in some Connecticut talent for the Jazzy’s gig: recent Guilford High grad Carter Bryan on keys, New Britain’s Eneji Alungbe on bass and, on sax, Wes Lewis, who daylights as a Yale bioinformatics Ph.D. student. They put a new sheen on classics like ​“Moanin’ ” while adding new compositions that stood out to the mix.

The main room was laid out with two rows of tables against the walls and a narrow alley between them leading up to the stage. The back wall of exposed brick was awash with so-called ​“bisexual” lighting — purple, blue, and pink lights that mimic the colors of the bisexual pride flag.

It was in front of this backdrop that the quartet, led by a lift-off in the keys, started in on Sonny Rollins’s ​“Oleo.” At the top of the second piece, Bryan snapped his fingers to lead the band in. The tempo stayed similar, while Lewis’s sax slowed down and became more meandering than frantic.

After Lewis stepped away, Wyman brought the drums to a whisper and let Alungbe get after it. This was ​“Domino Effect,” Wyman announced afterward, a Carter Bryan original composition. 

By the bass solo in ​“Pensativa,” the third piece and yet another popularized by Art Blakey, the dining audience was rapt. Whatever chatter had percolated during the louder sections now noticeably ceased as heads turned to the stage to watch Alungbe work. 

“Mr. PC,” a Coltrane tune dedicated to bassist Paul Chambers, showcased the physical toll that playing jazz can take. A sprinting sax section had Lewis doubled over and his forehead vein popping as he somehow conjured more and more breath at will. Bryan’s shoulder shimmy paired well with Alungbe’s head-bopping and general vibration during the sax-less interludes. 

I caught up with the band in the barroom after the first set. As players in the New Haven area’s jazz scene, they all knew one another from venues around town — like Café Nine’s jam sessions — but this was their first time all playing together. Wyman, who used to be a classical percussionist until he fell in love with the drumset, likes to ​“showcase talent” and play his band members’ originals when he puts together a band.

“Everyone has something unique to bring to the table,” he said. 

Sipping on a Moscow mule, Alungbe noted that, while he doesn’t compose, learning originals is ​“part of the job.” 

“All the best songs have already been written, anyway,” Lewis interjected.

When asked about ​“Moanin’,” Alungbe said that, despite its standard status, it isn’t called as much as it used to be, say, six or seven years ago.

“Everyone’s onto the new shit,” Alungbe added.

Bryan, the youngest of the bunch, composed ​“Domino Effect” at a jazz camp he attended three years ago. ​“The chords are rising and falling,” he explained, like dominos being set up and knocked down. 

The highlight of the second set was another original composition: Lewis’s ​“Dimensionality Reduction.” Lewis, who’s been playing sax since he was 8, often writes music with his brother, and that was the origin of this tune.

“Nobody wants me to name my songs after things in my research,” Lewis joked. But that didn’t stop him. 

Dimensionality reduction, he explained, is the process of taking higher-dimension data and making it visible in lower dimensions while preserving essential features. By way of example, Lewis pointed to the Milky Way. When we see stars at night, we are looking at hundreds of millions of square light-years of three-dimensional space converted into a flat plane with the stars as dots. That’s dimensionality reduction: profound and beautiful. 

Watts, the owner of Jazzy’s, works at Verizon when he’s not managing the cabaret. He prides himself on the diversity of musicians — ranging from jazz musicians to Tuvan throat singers — who come through his establishment, which will celebrate its fourth birthday in April. He’s named the items on his menu after various musicians, including one dish called the Wu-Tang (though when Ghostface Killah visited Jazzy’s, he ordered the Def Jam). 

The Avery Wyman Quartet ended off its second set and its night at Jazzy’s with ​“In Walked Bud,” a Thelonious Monk composition marked by a bassline with the feel of a bustling metropolis. So it went.