Yellowjackets getting hard to label, but crowd finds music easy to take

Music review

Talking about the Yellowjackets used to be easy: irresistible dance beat, bouncy melodies spiced with funk, and a seamless sound, live or recorded. For good and bad, they were fusion — and they had the Grammy Awards to prove it.

Over the last few years, however, the Yellowjackets have been playing a mean game of Stump-the-Critics. Take their latest album, “Greenhouse”: It starts with a classic Yellowjackets number, then swerves into the title cut sporting a synthesized string section, swollen with foreboding and melancholy. There’s a saxophone feature that flirts with both traditional jazz and New Age’s musical mantras. There’s a tribute to Aaron Copland, a piece of hyperactive Americana with dazzlingly agile solos.

Or take the Yellowjackets’ performance at the University of Maine at Augusta Tuesday night: from tentative experiments in improvisation to pre-planned — and pre-recorded — production numbers, band members put more effort into exploring their different musical ideas than fusing them together.

If they defied labels, however, they delighted the crowd. Jewett Hall Auditorium, which seated more than 250 jazz enthusiasts, was small enough to keep the band loose and the crowd involved. The Yellowjackets keep stage tricks to a minimum, but the audience followed their energetic solos with whoops and gasps and rapt attention.

The band, oddly, took its freshest steps with some of its early material, the stuff that was supposed to be happy and bland. Bob Mintzer, who joined the group this year as its horn player, took his electronic saxophone to a cut from the 1983 “Mirage a Trois” album and helped turn its happy-pop into energetic blues.

On “Whistle While You Walk,” from the 1989 album “Spin,” keyboardist and composer Russell Ferrante played with the rich palette of his synthesizer, then shifted to electric piano for a solo of sparse, wrenching figures that would build up, then spill out into a running line, sweeping the listener back to the main theme.

Jimmy Haslip, who founded the group with Ferrante, provided both rhythmic anchor and lead harmonic roles with his six-string bass, while drummer William Kennedy brought the group alive with an hour and a half of blazing hand speed on the snare and high hat.

A four-song set within a set, featuring music from the newly released “Greenhouse,” provided some of the strangest moments of the evening. Rather than try to simulate or do away with some of the percussion tracks on the album, the group brought them along on tape.

“Freedomland,” for instance, started when Ferrante hit the play button. The four group members then sat still, hands and heads hanging, listening to the pre-recorded riff and waiting for their entry cues. Chalk it up to songwriter’s vanity.

But on “Freda,” the Copland tribute, the group finally broke out of its line-for-line devotion to the album with some spirited and ambitious solos.

Despite the informal setting, Haslip — the group’s spokesman — said little, stepping in only to introduce the four songs from the new album. Maybe that was for the best; his comments ranged from pastel philosophy — “This song is dedicated to all the children of the world, because they are our future” — to the improbable and irrelevant — “We just finished a fabulous dinner of local haddock.”

But when the music works, which it did Tuesday night, you don’t need to say much. And if the Yellowjackets had a musical message for the critics, it might have been just that: sometimes it is more fun not to know where you are going, as long as you sound good getting there.