Startling takes on Mayfield

It's not the first thing you'd expect: New York avant-garde jazz bassist William Parker playing the songs of R&B pioneer Curtis Mayfield. Yet that's what transpired Saturday at the Painted Bride.

Leading an eight-piece group, Parker approached the material on his own terms - the terms of extended acoustic improvisation. Rather than a crossover project, this was a reimagining of the black-music continuum, shorn of artificial boundaries.

It was also a frank acknowledgment of Mayfield's political thrust: Parker speaks of these songs, and his reinterpretations, as "the soundtrack to the civil rights movement."

Ursula Rucker, the Philly-based hip-hop artist, contributed her own spoken lyrics and planted her feet in the movement's Marxist camp. Fist in the air, railing against capitalism and war, extolling revolution, she thundered: "I'll try to save you from the media's campaign to massacre your brain."

Balancing these self-serious, condescending, vulgar harangues was Leena Conquest, a small woman with a huge, honey-smooth voice, the jewel of the evening. Her out-of-tempo duet with drummer Hamid Drake on "The Makings of You" cloaked the Mayfield original in darker hues, evoking a gospel-soul mysticism.

Parker came up in the early '70s as a player of the densest free jazz, but he's not above locking into a funky bass line. He opened the show straightforwardly, with Mayfield's anthems of inner-city drug blight, "Freddie's Dead" and "Pusherman," girded by the riffs of Sabir Mateen and Darryl Foster (on saxophones) and Lewis Barnes (trumpet).

The music grew more abstract as the band segued loosely between numbers. At times, the songs seemed mere framing devices for group extemporization, not to mention virtuosic solo features by Parker, Drake and pianist Dave Burrell.

But on "People Get Ready," at a bright rock tempo, and "It's Alright," in a jubilant boogie-shuffle, the band embraced simplicity and lit up the house.

Switching to electric bass for the finale, "Move On Up," Parker got funkier still. And Conquest abandoned singing for a flighty interpretive dance.