Chris Potter has amassed a long list of awards and accolades in his 33 years: the IAJE Young Talent award for saxophone at age 12; named Presidential Scholar, Down Beat’s top high school jazz instrumentalist and winner of the Hennessey Jazz Search and Zoot Sims scholarships to study jazz at The New School for Social Research upon graduation from high school; finalist, 1991 Thelonious Monk Institute tenor sax competition; 1999 Grammy Award nominee; youngest recipient of Denmark’s 2000 Jazzpar Prize. His list of recordings as sideman to the stars (e.g., Joanne Brackeen, Kenny Werner, Marian McPartland, Steely Dan, Dave Holland, Dave Douglas) as well as leader in his own right is equally staggering. Above all else, however, Chris Potter represents the future of modern jazz—creative yet accessible, richly complex yet artfully emotional, highly original yet conceptually linked to 20^th century roots.

These multiple forces were clearly in evidence during his too-brief, two-set stand at the Dakota in downtown Minneapolis on June 3^rd. Hot on the heels of the release of “Lift,” the brilliant live recording from the Village Vanguard, Potter has organized a new quartet for his spring and summer tour. With a bass-less band featuring Craig Taborn on Fender Rhodes, Nate Smith on drums, and Adam Rogers on electric guitar, the overall sound has a different feel from the “Lift” quartet but burns with at least equal intensity. On this night, the band covered Radiohead (“Morning Bell”) and Beck (“Little One”) as well as a number of Potter originals, including a highly engaging, yet-to-be named “waltz/ballad.” The latter played out as a two-part suite with a transitional cadenza that singularly verified Potter’s talent as a no-holds-barred improviser.

With a big tone from top to bottom, barely rounded at the edges, Potter manages to chirp and honk without crossing into the often-abrasively shrill squeals of many of his contemporaries. With his simpatico partners, improvisations unfold as multiple layers of sound, rhythm and motion, as a team of archeologists digging from one strata to another, each layer revealing a new culture from another time. From the quirky rhythms of “Down” to the oblique harmonies of “Underground” to the hypnotic “Ever Present,” this band simmered, sizzled, and erupted in a soundscape where the total was even greater than the sum of its incredible parts. And often, but particularly on the untitled piece, there were moments when it seemed that the group would explode in four different directions, spinning to the edge of the galaxy, only to reassemble in a sweet re-entry.