[Dixielandjazz] Is This The Future of Jazz Festivals? OKOM & Non OKOM Jazz?

[Stephen Barbone]

List Mates:

Following is a NY Times Review of the Montreal Jazz? Festival. It draws
over one and a half million people and more than 50% of it's offering is
other than jazz.  Largest concert, a Latin Ska group drew 100,000
people. Question. Given our OKOM experiences with the Sacramento Jubilee
and other Jazz? Festivals is this scene changing. Will future "jazz"
festivals become "music:" festivals?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

July 10, 2002 - New York Times

With a Huge Jazz Festival, Montreal Is Understated

By NEIL STRAUSS

MONTREAL, July 7 — It is hard to grasp the Montreal International Jazz
Festival, which began on June 27 and ended Sunday. Twenty-three years
old and one of the biggest and most respected festivals of its kind, it
attracted some 1.65 million people to some 500 free and paid concerts
over two weeks. But unlike the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival,
it did not necessarily celebrate a regional culture.

Its scope was global, and more than half the shows were in genres other
than jazz: electronic dance, Latin, Cajun, blues, rock and more.
Furthermore, on the festival grounds, which closed off several downtown
streets, there was no highly charged vibe or energy in the
crowd, which was often somewhat listless in a Montreal heat wave (into
the 90's). The festival's biggest concert drew more than
100,000 people to see the Latin ska group King Chango, and when its lead
singer, Andrew Blanco, praised the festival as one of the
greatest, there was no significant enthusiastic response from the
audience. This suggested a festival that hasn't been personified
enough to become a star in itself.

André Ménard, the festival's artistic director, offered another
perspective. "The festival in Montreal is a big star in itself, a big
source of
pride for the city," he said. "It makes people tourists in their own
city — they see how we've transformed downtown — and tourists to
music, because they haven't heard of most of these musicians."

Most of the festival's nonmusical offerings — food, souvenirs,
children's activities — were mundane. This, however, could also be
seen as a positive feature, because the festival doesn't allow outside
concessions (or, for the most part, V.I.P. areas), which kept the
grounds relatively commerce- and ego-free, a rarity these days.

But precisely because the spirit of the festival is like that of
mercury, it gives the programmers remarkable leeway, resulting in two
weeks that were an eye-opener musically, with performers booked not for
popularity but artistic merit, including many European
musicians who aren't regulars on these shores. Rather than book a
mainstream act for its big, televised event, the programmers chose
King Chango, a little New York band that despite being visibly nervous
at first easily won over the audience with its energy, charisma
and incessant speeches, playing as if it was intended for an audience
that big.

Beyond the free concerts on stages in the street, the festival's best
talent was reserved for the paying customers, who flocked to concert
halls surrounding the streets of the festival. When asked what makes the
festival distinct to Montreal, Mr. Ménard said that it had
eight or so concert halls in a several-block radius (and a government
supportive enough to close major streets for two weeks).

At a small, beautiful auditorium in a church, the Salles du Gesù,
different guitarists performed each night: Bill Frisell, John Scofield,
Marc Ribot and Charlie Hunter, who, with graceful complexity, made a
solo performance sound like that of a guitar trio, despite being
frustrated by problems with a guitar string.

Club Soda had a wide-ranging vocal series in the early evening. Some
shows were disappointing: the graceful, understated eclecticism
of the Swiss art-song singer Susanne Abbuehl on record was obscured by
the unsteadiness of her live prowess. Others were
revelations. The Norwegian pop-jazz star Silje Nergaard and her talented
trio may not have been technically perfect, but they
compensated with emotional reach and a rare spatial awareness, letting
notes, phrases, gestures, emotions and solos breathe like wine.
And still other shows lived up to the hype: Norah Jones, the crossover
jazz vocalist, pianist and daughter of Ravi Shankar, opened her
show with a version of Hank Williams's "Cold Cold Heart" that captured
the forlorn desperation of the original perfectly, then cycled
through a widely varied rock, jazz, pop and country repertory with
complete consistency.

At midnight, Soda turned into a dance club with highly musical
electronic acts booked, among them the London hip-hop crew the
Herbaliser, the Anglo-Asian electro-acoustic dreamer Nitin Sawhney, the
Montreal producer and multi-instrumentalist Freeworm and
the German electronic, lounge and jazz act De Phazz, which put on a
well-planned, constantly fluctuating live show that was most
engaging when it was at its most minimal.

Further evidence of the festival's diversity and reach was a series at
the Cinémathèque Québécoise, where silent films (from classic
French avant-garde shorts to slapstick comedy to Felix the Cat cartoons)
were shown with piano accompaniment.

One of the best series was at Monument National, where two Cuban-born
pianists, Gonzalo Rubalcaba the first week and Chucho
Valdés the second week, performed in four ensembles each. Though a
much-anticipated show by a mystery ensemble formed by Mr.
Rubalcaba didn't live up to the secret billing (it just featured David
Sanchez, who had performed with Mr. Rubalcaba the night before),
the sets were each remarkably accomplished, fluid, personal and
completely in-the-moment, implicitly challenging yet communicated
with ease. Mr. Valdés played with Kenny Barron on Night 1, Ron Carter
and Idris Muhammad on Night 2, his Afro-Cuban Quartet
on Night 3, and most spectacularly on Night 4 with his legendary Cuban
jazz orchestra Irakere, who performed a set so flawlessly
communicated and executed, so rife with solos that flowed like
narratives, and so emotionally and rhythmically transcendent that even
though the lineup of the band doesn't approach its former grandeur,
audience members were staring at each other agape after each
piece, as if to say, "Did you just hear what I did?"

Among the many other memorable performers were the 60's rock icon
Marianne Faithfull, brassy and ravaged, who discovered
midway through her set that her fly was undone; the Blind Boys of
Alabama, whose gospel voices melted into the fine acoustics of the
Spectrum; Daniel Lanois, the U2 and Bob Dylan producer, who reminded the
audience of his French Canadian roots, phenomenally
intuitive electric guitar playing and socially conscious songwriting;
and Soraya Benítez, a Venezuelan singer living in Quebec with a
husky operatic voice, unusual arrangements and a passionate almost
unsettling mix of the serious and sensual.

Also performing were Lauryn Hill, Remy Shand, Tabla Beat Science, a
cabaret act by Robert Lepage and Peter Gabriel called "Zulu
Time," Orquesta Aragon, Diana Reeves, Toots Thielemans with Kenny
Werner, Zimbabwe's Cool Crooners, Christine Jensen, Dave
Brubeck (joined briefly by the guitarist Jim Hall) and Wynton Marsalis,
who is to play with the other performing members of his
family in one of the headline events of next year's festival. It is
being planned for June 26 to July 6 and is also set to include Ibrahim
Ferrer of the Buena Vista Social Club.