Newport 2009 - Day 2

Sorry for the lag...

The second day of the Newport Jazz Festival was an absolutly amazing experience.

I love Joe Lovano. I have loved Joe Lovano since "Universal Language" back in the 90s.

Joe Lovano played on Sunday as the first act on the main stage. It...was....beyond....words!

NPR webcast the performance and it is available for download here. RUN, do not walk, to this site and download it. US5 is, in my opinion, his most creative project yet and they were in top form. The 2-drummer format worked very nicely...very textural and not much "bashing" (although, there was some). Esperanza killed it for a second day in a very different setting. She is an amazing musician.

Roy Haynes and Ron Carter (!)...another killer set. Ron's bass sound is as thick as ever and his playing is even more refined than I remember.

Brubeck was as elegant as always. Played mostly Duke tunes and it was great to hear his sensibilities steeped through Dukes compositions.

Enjoy the pics:

Brubeck!

Lovano and some hack...

Roy Haynes and Ron Carter

Lovano!

Lovano on Tarogato...

Newport 2009 - Day 1

What a great day. The weather was perfect, bright and sunny (as evidenced by some very unfortunate tan lines on your's truly...I was wearing a Kufi. Use your imagination....) and not too hot. The music was wonderful! I heard:

The Cedar Walton All Stars - Cedar with Lou Tabackin and Curtis Fuller. Lou is always a treat to hear and what a privlidge to hear Curtis. One of the only (if not THE only) bone players to play with Trane. The music was right out of the hard bop/modal genre. Cedar's great tunes sound great with the tenor/bone combination.

Esperanza Spalding - How is it that I have not been listening to her for the past couple of years?!? Killer bass player, that goes without saying, but her vocal work really knocked me out today. Informed to my ears by Betty Carter as well as artists like Stevie Wonder, there is an element on her upper range that just grabs at my heart. I'll be visiting iTunes soon.

Joshua Redman - Josh hit with his double trio, which at times covered the entire spectrum from solo to sextet, with all mathematical combinations in between. I haven't checked out much of Redman's music in the past few years. Hearing him today makes me realize what I have been missing. The music was exploratory, very textural and formally VERY interesting. No head-solos-head.

Branford Marsalis - When I was in high school, Branford was my hero. I begged my father to take me to hear him when he would come through Chicago/Ravinia etc... I have gotten away from listening to him in the past few years, but today was a nice reminder of how much I like him. A good mix of standards and originals, his set was full of mastery. Branford's harmonic sense is quite original while keeping touch with history and his rhythmic concept is just amazing. He can shift gears between upper and lower neighbor meters with more ease than anyone I can think of. His soprano tone is to die for!

A great day of music and I can't wait for tomorrow...Photos follow...

Esperanza Spalding

Joshua Redman

Esperanza Spalding

Branford Marsalis

Esperanza Spalding

The crowds

The NPR Command Center

Cedar Walton, Curtus Fuller, Lou Tabackin

The Jazz Showcase & Jimmy Heath

A benefit to having family near Chicago is that on every visit, I get a good Chicago fix.

Last night I ventured in to the new Jazz Showcase to hear Jimmy and Tootie Heath and it was just beyond words. First, a few words about the venue. I have a long history with the Showcase, going back to its tenure at The Blackstone Hotel, through its location on Grand. It was the first jazz club I ever went to thanks to their very progressive and still in place All Ages policy. I have heard too many heavies there to count but some of the standouts include: James Moody, Elvin Jones, David Liebman, Ira Sullivan, Tom Harrell, Dave Holland, Joe Lovano and John Scofield. I even had the great opportunity to perform there for a week. When I was at NIU, the Jazz Ensemble had a long standing performance there the week of the Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic - this is when the Showcase was at The Blackstone - and I played there with Jon Faddis doing all of Dizzy's Big Band rep. I was very happy to read that the Showcase was back in action at Dearborn Station in the South Loop.

The room is great. Not a bad seat in the house and the sound is to die for. It is still a pantheon of jazz history with pictures and playbills of "Showcases past" and enormous photos of Bird and Trane still watch over all proceedings.

Jimmy Heath was just KILLIN!!!!! If you have the chance, RUN, do not walk, stroll or otherwise prevaricate to hear him. The man is a walking Rosetta stone of the jazz language of the past 60 years. His vocabulary is deeply rooted in Bebop but he has kept pace with the rhythmic, sonic and harmonic progression since the Bebop era. He has a rich, dark sound with, to my ear, overtones of Trane and Joe Henderson but not sounding at all derivative. The harmonic language, while rooted in Bebop, was very forward thinking and always grounded in a sense of melody that can sometimes be lacking in very harmonic playing. His rhythmic interaction with Tootie was just off the map. These two were completing each other's sentences left and right. Something that comes for YEARS of playing and developing together.

The only disappointment was the size of the audience. There were probably 25-30 people in the club, and for a town like Chicago on a Friday night, I would have expected more.

Through Sunday at The Jazz Showcase
806 S. Plymouth Ct.
Chicago IL 60605
312-360-0234

Sets at 8 & 10 on Saturday
4, 8 & 10 on Sunday

Turtle Island Quartet with Stefon Harris

Heard a great hit tonight:  The Turtle Island Quartet with Stefon Harris.

I have always liked TIQ because of the sensibility that they approach music with.  They play in the moment, improvise and maintain a jazz aesthetic in everything they play.  From their bio:

"At the time of Haydn's apocryphal creation of the string quartet form, musicians were more akin to today's saxophonists and keyboard masters of the jazz and pop world, i.e., improvisers, composers and arrangers.  Each Turtle Island member is accomplished in these areas..."

I have often wondered exactly how it was that improvisation stopped being a common skill, but that is a topic for another post.  

The centerpieces of tonight's performance were several pieces from Duke's Sacred Concerts arranged and set into a suite by violinist David Balakrishnan.  The suite was composed of:  It's Freedom, Praise God, and Come Sunday.  The setting was transcendent and Stefon's vibe playing was the perfect color to offset the strings.  Other than Stefon's playing, other highlights included 'cellist Mark Summer's channeling of Mahalia on the theme of Come Sunday and Stefon's reading of a portion of the text from a eulogy that Duke gave for Strays over the setting of It's Freedom.  It was no surprise that Duke's Sacred music translated  very well to the string texture, but I was very pleasantly surprised at the concert's closer, an arrangement of Chick Corea's Senor Mouse on which everyone stretched.  Stefon, of course, was bad.  Other great moments were Mark Summer's pizz work and Mads Tolling's solo work.

Here is a portion of the text that Stefon read.  "He demanded freedom of expression and lived in what we consider the most important and moral of freedoms:  freedom from hate, unconditionally; freedom from self-pity; freedom from fear of possibly doing something that might help another more than it might himself; and freedom from the kind of pride that could make a man feel he was better than his brother".