Much anticipated, bursting with talented performers, this collaboration should have had the crowd at Lincoln Center jumping with exuberance by the time the curtain came down. But the ovation sounded more dutiful than delirious. The work was simply too lopsided to make much of an impact: all the excitement in it came from the orchestra pit. Despite their charm, the dancers couldn’t make Martins’s choreography look anything but brisk and impersonal, as if that 13-year-old jazz fan had put aside his youthful passion to become the dance equivalent of a jingle writer.
The ballet has six speedy sections, each of which tries to evoke a bit of Americana-the railroad, the blues, a New Orleans funeral and so on. But none of this imagery comes to life in the dancing. There are high kicks and backbends, lots of sashaying around, lots of jutting hips, but not a single move or gesture has personality or even logic commanding it. It’s jazz choreography without heart or style-canned Broadway.
The real treat of the evening was the chance to hear Marsalis and his band (his regular septet augmented with four musicians) tearing through his new score with a verve and vigor rarely heard at the ballet. The music is a raucous pastiche of jazz traditions, from jubilant marches to the wailing of a New Orleans funeral procession, concluding with a big, buoyant ragtime section. There’s even the blast of a locomotive. (The band will play at every performance of “Jazz” this season; what will happen in subsequent seasons has not yet been determined.) If the choreography had shown as much brash good humor as the music, “Jazz” would have been the great romp it was meant to be-and a matchless way to lure a whole new audience to the ballet.
