Seeing live jazz at an opera house is such a strange pleasure — especially when the opera house in question is Toronto’s Four Season’s Centre. The sightlines are impeccable and you don’t have to strain to hear the performance over half-drunk, jazz-student chatter. Don’t get me wrong — I love The Pilot, but I also love tuning out everything around me and focussing solely on the music at hand.
It’s under these conditions that I finally get to see the much-hyped Botos Brothers — the Torontonian-by-way-of-Hungary sibling jazzers, piano phenomenon Robi and drummer Frank. And what a first encounter it is. The trio — rounded out by bassist brother Lojas, who flew in from their homeland for the gig — open with an uptempo hard-bop number that takes a few minutes to coalesce, likely due to Robi’s piano being approximately an icing-call away from Frank’s drum kit. They quickly compensate by treating the audience to the future of jazz in Toronto by way of Robi’s imaginative playing (including a funky plucked-string coda) and a maddeningly intricate drum solo from Frank. After a majestic ballad and a playfully shape-shifting take on “Footprints,” the band is joined by six-sting bassist Attila Darvas for some of the finest playing yet. And if that’s not enough, Lojas takes centre stage for the final number and goes all Susan Boyle on the crowd with a stunning vocal performance of Robi’s “Memories of Love.”
But the openers are more of an added bonus for this crowd, as it’s pretty clear that most people are here to bow down before the jazz-guitar deity that is Pat Metheny. Appropriately, he’s again playing with the band that introduced him to the world as 20-year old prodigy back in 1974: the Gary Burton Quartet. What began as a one-off reunion gig has turned into a three-year outing for Burton’s band — which also features bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Antonio Sanchez (who was born sometime after the rest of them started playing together, the bandleader jokes) — but the Toronto date marks the end of their current tour.
Consequently, everybody seems eager to exhaust all the ideas in their respective arsenals as they revisit classics from their Passengers album (the Chick Corea-written “Sea Journey”), as well as tunes by contemporaries Carla Bley and Keith Jarrett (Burton says that he used to get a lot of music in the mail from the latter) and a number of Metheny’s own compositions. In particular, Burton is a blur of mallets as he effortlessly flows from one end of the vibes to the other while Metheny — whose hair is only slightly less iconic than that of head Melvin Buzz Osbourne — checks off every note on the guitar at one point or another.
As undeniably talented as the band may be, Metheny’s plastic-sounding guitar tone and the vibraphone’s limited sonic range — not to mention the fact that both of Sanchez’s drum solos consist of one basic idea — makes for a trying listening experience. Only when Metheny switches guitars and clicks on the distortion, or whips out the gargantuan Pikasso guitar do things get really interesting.
That being said, three-quarters of Burton’s band are basically living legends whose musical output shows little signs of slowing. Even at 68 years old, there’s no question that Steve Swallow could teach the Botos Brothers a thing or 10.