Gary Berger's Band and Liz Filo

Two nights a week, the solemn chess-players in the Quincy House Junior Common Room have to decamp to make room for a 15-piece jazz band. This aggregation, known as the Gary Berger Band, demonstrated in its first public recital Saturday night (a benefit affair for Tocsin--"Peace through Jazz"?) that there ought to be more jazz in concert at Harvard.

Unfortunately, the first set seemed to indicate mostly that those chess players ought to make room more than twice a week. Pianist Brian Cooke, who leads the band, had put together a disappointingly limited program, made up almost exclusively of arrangements by Quincy Jones and Boston's own Herb Pomeroy: not that there's anything wrong with Jones and Pomeroy, but the "quiet cook" tempo they both favor quickly grows wearing, and the band's ensemble work on such tunes as Aluminum Baby and Quince was ragged and lugubrious (though the reeds were quite smooth). Moreover, the brass insisted on substituting bastard-Armstrong vibrato for clean attack, and the solos were badly phrased and unimaginative.

Save for a fine arrangement of Summertime by the band's flutist and guitarist Carl Chase, and a wonderful long solo by Cooke on Blue Grass, the concert didn't really begin until the band's highly impressive vocalist, Liz Filo, swept on stage towards the end of the first set. But Mrs. Filo (who, in a black cocktail dress, improved my frame of mind before she even opened her mouth) picked up band and audience alike, and only set them down, flushed and cheering, after six stunning tunes. The band improved with her very first number, skillfully backing her on When Sunny Gets Blue; then it left the stage to join the enthusiastic (if regrettably small) audience to hear Mrs. Filo do the rest of her numbers with a piano, bass and drums trio. She concluded the brilliant first set with "an imitation of Eartha Kitt singing I Want to Be Bad" which was all Filo--no Kitt. And her versions later of Willow Weep for Me and the too-little-known Something Cool demonstrated what I think is her most impressive gift: she has an astonishing stylistic range, big as Ethel Merman one minute, gentle as Chris Connors the next.

She must have melted the band's hearts (and lips) as well as mine, for when they came back on they were relaxed and swinging: happily mixing up some Basie and Hefti with Jones and Pomeroy, and making even the Jones much more interesting. The solos were also excellent all of a sudden, especially on Jessica's Day (which to my mind is Quince-essential Jones). In its last five numbers, the Berger band showed itself almost the equal of its splendid vocalist, and left me hoping for more of the same.