[Dixielandjazz] What is Jazz?

Steve Barbone barbonestreet at earthlink.net
Fri Jun 15 07:27:04 PDT 2007


What is Jazz? Visit NYC these next two weeks and you'll find it everywhere.
Or if bored with jazz, come and see "Pink Martini"
http://www.pinkmartini.com/about/pm_about.html

Here are a FEW highlights of the jazz FESTIVAL. Note especially Preservation
Hall, as well as Marion McPartland's tribute to Jimmy with what should prove
to be a great Dixieland Band.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


If It¹s June, This Must Be Jazz
NY TIMES - By BEN RATLIFF - June 15, 2007

Every year in New York, toward the end of June, jazz suddenly becomes easier
to understand. Not that the music empties out its tough ideas and becomes
more glossy or simple-minded. Rather, the picture of what jazz is around the
world grows sharper, as the possibilities of what to hear grow finer and
deeper.

The glut of good gigs has to do with the JVC Jazz Festival New York and the
Vision Festival, which run concurrently in the last two weeks of June.
Bookings in some of the jazz clubs are folded into the JVC schedule, but
even unaffiliated small spaces, theaters and festivals get into the spirit,
competing for listeners, making use of the players and audiences in town.

As usual, a road map is in order. Here are some high points of the next two
weeks, most of them from the festivals. The jazz listings in this section
have more complete information about the riches of the season.


CASSANDRA WILSON/OLU DARA In the early 1990s Cassandra Wilson made ³Blue
Light ¹Til Dawn,² an album with light, slow-moving, Southern-signifying
arrangements informed by ¹60s folk and pop. The trumpeter, guitarist and
songwriter Olu Dara, a Mississippian like Ms. Wilson, was one of her
collaborators; his own subsequent solo albums, full of acoustic guitar
grooves and rural-blues echoes, complemented hers. Central Park SummerStage,
Rumsey Playfield, midpark at 70th Street, summerstage.org, 7 p.m., free.

Tuesday June 19th 2007

JIMMY MCPARTLAND CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
Marian McPartland with Howard Alden, Bill Crow, Eddie Locke, Joe Muranyi,
Ken Peplowski, Bobby Pring & Warren Vache
Kaye Playhouse @ Hunter College East 68th Street (between Park & Lexington
Avenues) New York, NY  8pm $45

ŒBOURBON STREET COMES TO BROADWAY¹: PRESERVATION HALL JAZZ BAND JVC-New
York¹s first big concert is organized around the Preservation Hall Jazz Band
of New Orleans, founded in 1961 by Allan and Sandra Jaffe, a young couple
who became important guardians of the city¹s early jazz. (Among their
boosters was George Wein, the original producer of the New Orleans Jazz and
Heritage Festival and also the founder of the JVC Festival. He visited New
Orleans for the first time in 1962 and got a education in the city and its
music from the Jaffes.)

Long a beloved but sleepy part of New Orleans music history, the band has
raised its profile in recent years, touring and recording with new vigor.
Here the band, led by the trumpeter John Brunious, with the Jaffes¹ son Ben
on bass, shares the stage with the keyboardist, singer, songwriter and
producer Allen Toussaint, a New Orleans genius, as well as the violinist
Jenny Scheinman and the saxophonist Steve Wilson, who can play with heart in
almost any style. Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, Manhattan, 8 p.m., $40 to
$55.

Wednesday

BRANFORD MARSALIS/JOSHUA REDMAN TRIO Mr. Marsalis started making his own
records in 1984, Mr. Redman nine years later. But as if responding to a
common call, both these tenor saxophonists have crystallized what they do
best and made possibly the best records of their careers over the last year:
Mr. Marsalis¹s ³Braggtown² and Mr. Redman¹s ³Back East.² With Mr. Marsalis
this comes down to the mechanics of his gloriously coordinated, hard-hitting
quartet; with Mr. Redman, it¹s the clarity and flow of his improvising
within the simplicity of a trio setting. Town Hall, JVC, 8 p.m., $50 to $65.

BILL DIXON AND SOUND VISION ORCHESTRA As a trumpeter Mr. Dixon breaks down
his playing to liquid blobs of sound: slow, low and dark, or fast metallic
smears. As a composer he sometimes writes music ‹ in the case of his
Wednesday concert, dense and bracing large-scale orchestral material ‹ that
he radically reshapes in performance.

Born in 1925, he was a senior member of the 1960s jazz avant-garde in New
York even as it was starting. In 1964 he produced the October Revolution in
Jazz, a four-day festival of music and politicized panel discussions about
vanguard art and economics that was one of the models for today¹s Vision
Festival. (He will receive a lifetime recognition award this year.)

Mr. Dixon will play new music with a 17-piece band, some of its members
former students from the nearly 30 years he taught at Bennington College.
³It¹s an untitled long work, subdivided into a lot of sections,² he said the
other day. 

He rehearses the band with written scores but lets real-time considerations
‹ how the room sounds, how certain people are playing ‹ change the piece as
it¹s being performed. ³I¹ll be able to interlope or set up things,² he
explained. ³Section A, for instance, might not come at the beginning. It
comes down to this: How do you make a piece of music sound both as though it
were notated and as if it could only happen once this way?² Vision,Angel
Orensanz Foundation, 7:30, $30.

Friday, June 22

50 VIOLINS FOR LEROY JENKINS The violinist Leroy Jenkins died in February,
at 74, and took a lot of history with him. Coming from a fertile time and
place for American music ‹ Chicago in the 1940s and ¹50s ‹ he often became
involved, after moving to New York, in bands and projects that were either
leaderless avant-garde jazz cooperatives or complicated cross-discipline
projects. (These range from his early small bands, like the Revolutionary
Ensemble, to his late multimedia operas.) Along the way he built an entire
community around him, and here he will be honored with a 50-violin salute,
led onstage by the violinist Billy Bang. Vision, 7 p.m., $30.

STEFANO BOLLANI SOLO A fine and freewheeling Italian pianist in his mid-30s,
Mr. Bollani has come to the crucial understanding that he can find an
audience without having to choose among attitudes, influences and styles:
deeply playful or serious, ragtime, pop, Prokofiev, Jobim, Keith Jarrett,
whatever. He is a particularly good solo performer (as suggested by last
year¹s ³Piano Solo,² on ECM), so this performance will be a special one.
Fazioli Salon at Klavierhaus, 211 West 58th Street, Manhattan,
pianoculture.com, 8 p.m., $25.



Saturday, June 23

GANELIN TRIO Led by the Lithuanian pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin, the Ganelin
Trio was the modern Soviet jazz group in the 1970s. In the ¹80s, when the
group¹s recordings started to become known in the West, it became
controversial. Full of improvisation and challenge, the music stood for an
idea of freedom, yet Mr. Ganelin could never talk about it as such for fear
of losing his livelihood. The group broke up in 1987, then re-formed; it has
two new members now, the saxophonist Petras Vysniauskas and the drummer
Klaus Kugel, and they¹re still playing highly interactive, tensile music.
Vision, 7:30, $30. 

Sunday, June 24

LOUIS MOHOLO-MOHOLO A South African jazz drummer, Mr. Moholo-Moholo was part
of the British jazz scene in the mid-¹60s as a member of the Blue Notes and
the Brotherhood of Breath, living in London and collaborating with South
African and English musicians. (He recently returned to South Africa, where
he leads a big band.) He¹s an exemplary modern drummer, in his flexibility
between strong swing and a free-rhythm vocabulary, and he¹s still mostly
unknown here: aside from one Vision Festival show six years ago, he hasn¹t
played here since the 1960s. Vision, 9 p.m., $30.

Monday, June 25

LEE KONITZ Mr. Konitz turns 80 in October, and he remains radical, in his
own way: He believes that a jazz improviser has to learn the basics,
establish his own vocabulary, then try to escape his own patterns as much as
possible.

³I feel more concerned with each note than I have ever been before,² he said
earlier this week. Starting from familiar ground on standards, he works
variations on their melodies and can eventually travel toward a kind of
sweet and lapidary free improvising.

This birthday concert ‹ organized by the saxophonist and arranger Ohad
Talmor, a frequent collaborator over the last 15 years ‹ will show the two
sides of Mr. Konitz, the improviser and the composer. He¹ll start off
playing loosely and interactively among old friends: the saxophonists Joe
Lovano and Ted Brown, the bassist Steve Swallow and the drummer Paul Motian.
Then he¹ll perform his own pieces, arranged by Mr. Talmor, with three other
groups: the Lee Konitz New Nonet; the Spring String Quartet, from Linz,
Austria; and the Orquestra Jazz Matosinhos, a big band from Porto, Portugal.
Zankel Hall, JVC, 8:30 p.m., $50.

Wednesday, June 27

ŒRON CARTER: THE MASTER AT 70¹ The bassist Ron Carter, first famous as a
member of Miles Davis¹s mid-1960s quintet and then loosed on the jazz world
as a ubiquitous free agent, has played on so many records ‹ including more
than 30 of his own ‹ that a concert like this seems almost necessary, never
mind the fact that he turned 70 last month. He will perform with two other
members of that great Davis group, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter and the
pianist Herbie Hancock, alongside Billy Cobham on drums; in duet with the
guitarist Jim Hall (a good thing, as their rich duet records are
underrated); in a trio with the pianist Mulgrew Miller and the guitarist
Russell Malone; and with his own quartet. Carnegie Hall, JVC, 8 p.m., $30 to
$75.

Friday, June 29

NANCY WILSON Ms. Wilson remains an exciting jazz singer, despite the light,
low-pressure subtleties of her voice, and even if her records have been
treated as a kind of antidote to excitement. (Her hits started showing up on
the Billboard easy-listening chart in the mid-¹60s, but few can condescend
to the casually brilliant album ³Cannonball Adderley and Nancy Wilson² or
the recently released ³Live in Las Vegas.²)

She turned 70 in February, and her concert at Carnegie will bring on a
plankful of admirers: the singers Dianne Reeves, Kurt Elling and Nnenna
Freelon; the violinist Regina Carter; and the pianists Herbie Hancock and
Ramsey Lewis. 

Ms. Wilson has hardly ever sung a duet with another vocalist, and she says
she has been thinking of asking a guest to help her sing her old hit ³Guess
Who I Saw Today,² about catching sight of a cheating spouse. (³Can I fix you
a quick martini? As a matter of fact I¹ll have one with you/For, to tell you
the truth, I¹ve had quite a day too.²) ³I respect that more than any other
song,² she said the other day. ³It just defines what I like to do: to dig in
and sing a lyric that¹s going to hit somebody sentimentally, or even hard.²
JVC, 8 p.m., $35 to $85.





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