"You haven't heard him recently?" said guitarist Peter Bernstein. "It's really different now."
Bernstein was referring to a change in Hutcherson's playing in the last several years.
"He used to come on with this incredible force, playing a rush of notes. Now it's different. But I can't put it into words." Pete did say that he was using shorter phrases, but declined to say what he was doing during that shorter time.
"Understatement?" I asked, to which Bernstein said that wasn't really it.
I'll venture to try to describe what I then heard Hutcherson do, with the hubris of one who would dance about architecture.
It was packing a number of ideas into a short space. Not understated as much as densely compressed. Each phrase suggested several different musical directions, but did not complete or follow through with or exhaust those directions. Each direction pointed way outward, but didn't travel there before another challenge was seamlessly taken up.
On "Nancy with the Laughing Face," for example, Hutcherson completed one arching phrase that first introduced a fairly startling whole tone scale, then went in a modal fourth pattern far from the original key.
Typical materials from the chromatic language of bop and beyond. But the phrase was only a bar long.
The effect was like vertigo, as I reacted to this surprising interruption to the lyricism of the song, then experience another swoop away from the expected so soon.
It's like poetry. To suggest more than one says, by using ambiguity, allusion, ellipsis. Holding eternity in a grain of sand.
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