Jazz supergroup the Cookers heats up the Dakota

"You better remove that roof before we arrive, or we will blow it off."

That's Cecil McBee, the 79-year old bassist-composer for the Cookers, warning the Dakota Jazz Club to make contingency plans before the jazz septet arrives in Minneapolis on Thursday night.

The Cookers' calling card is experience. Collectively, its seven members have spent more than 250 years making music, on hundreds of tours and thousands of recordings.

Case in point: The first song on their just-released fourth record, "Time and Time Again," is "Sir Galahad," a composition by tenor saxophonist Billy Harper that initially appeared on a 1973 album by Harper. Cookers pianist George Cables played on that rendition, too.

That kind of interlocking longevity makes it easy to classify the Cookers as a "retro" band, keeping the flame of the hard-bop jazz tradition alive.

Given that the group was founded by former Freddie Hubbard bandmate David Weiss to reprise the crackling hard bop created by the "Night of the Cookers" albums, featuring Hubbard and Lee Morgan in the 1960s, that aspect of their lineage is undeniable.

But what gets lost in the labeling is the band's dynamic evolution over its seven-year history. While five of the members are at least 69 years old, they all continue to lead busy schedules as headliners in their own right. (Drummer Billy Hart brought his own quintet into the Dakota this summer.) But playing together regularly has created an exponential growth in how they interact.

"By now everyone has so much confidence in themselves and each other that you can go into the unknown, where the level of music is the highest. It's not about B-flat, it is about approaching B-flat in a way that opens a door, and leaving B-flat in a way that opens another door."

The Cookers experienced their first personnel change about a year ago when alto saxophonist Craig Handy left the band. The group experimented with trying to replace him with a precocious younger talent.

"The idea was to give someone an opportunity that just won't exist in this music for that much longer," said Weiss, who at 49 is a generation younger than most of his bandmates. But after a few tries, the band eventually decided to go with an established veteran, ex-Jazz Messenger Donald Harrison, 54.

"It was just too obvious how far removed the younger players were from what we were doing," Weiss said. "I mean, you have no idea what it is like to stand between Billy Harper and [trumpeter] Eddie Henderson and play at that level. I mean, I am practicing harder than ever and I can't catch them."

That's because the vets are practicing, too. Weiss and McBee both report that when the Cookers took a grueling tour of Europe recently, Cables doggedly wedged in time for practice every day.

The synergy of confidence within the Cookers also "sharpens the thought process of my writing," McBee noted.

Referring to one of his songs on the new record, "Dance of the Invisible Nymph," he says, "I had never written a song in [a time signature of] 11/4 before. If it wasn't 4/4, it would be 5/4. So there is an example of how this group challenged me to improve my composing."

For all this interior sophistication, the Cookers remain a blast furnace of infectious power and rhythm. Four top-notch horn players erupt together in chromatic splendor — or, to use McBee's language, open doors for one another while the nonpareil rhythm section of Cables, McBee and Hart keeps finding new ways to stoke and shift the pulse of tune.