Humanity Quartet played a late set full of original compositions, flowing improvisation, structural surprises, and humor to a packed house at Smalls, in New York City’s West Village, in what was actually the earliest hour of August 20. The group consists of esteemed New York City jazz veterans drummer Leon Parker, bassist Sean Smith, tenor saxophonist Joel Frahm, and guitarist Peter Bernstein.
They didn’t explain their name, and I have no official word on this, but it seems to me that the name of the group could be a reference to the subtle, hard-to-notice variations in human interaction that are always happening yet never undermine communication, and without which we’d just be complicated machines. Maybe I’m stretching in my interpretation, but most, if not all, of the tunes in their set of six contained a twist on jazz bandstand conventions.