[Dixielandjazz] Newport Jazz Festival

[Stephen G Barbone]

This was a very different festival from those in the early years. Note  
Ratliff's conclusion  that casual jazz fans now outnumber the serious  
fans. (who he describes as: "Readers of Downbeat, vibraphone freaks,  
alternate-take memorizers, musicians of one kind or another.")

Perhaps the days of the "casual" fans are here to stay for a while?  
Does that mean me, and me one eyed mate Bill Haesler are a vanishing  
breed, or are we simply irrelevant? Bound to happen one day I suppose.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

Jazz’s Present Gets Its Chance at Newport

NY TIMES - AUG 8, 2011 - By BEN RATLIFF


NEWPORT, R.I. — Leaving the Newport Jazz Festival on Sunday evening,  
hearing Rudresh Mahanthappa and Bunky Green’s bright and brilliant  
alto saxophone sounds recede as you walked in the rain toward the  
water, you could feel a couple of contradictory things. One: The  
Newport Jazz Festival still matters. Two: That was pretty good for the  
Newport Jazz Festival.

Oh, there was a minority of serious fans at Fort Adams State Park, on  
the harbor. Readers of Downbeat, vibraphone freaks, alternate-take  
memorizers, musicians of one kind or another. (Tickets cost $75 at the  
gate, but only $15 if you had a current Berklee or New England  
Conservatory student ID.) I’m guessing about this, though I am  
familiar with the species.

But a more casual species made up a majority: those who might have  
been there because the Newport Jazz Festival is a place to go in a  
bright T-shirt and a straw hat, a summer tradition in a part of the  
country that loves summer traditions. Perhaps, years ago, their  
parents or uncles had taken them there. Perhaps they had taken their  
parents or uncles. This is not good or bad; it’s just how jazz  
audiences are. They’re sentimental. They want to return to things. But  
unlike the audience of 1954, the first year of the festival, very few  
people in the culture of jazz these days are on the same page. And so  
the overriding mood in the audience — declared by festival organizers  
to be 7,500 on sunny Saturday and 5,000 on rainy Sunday, though I  
don’t quite buy the second number — was one of pleasant distraction.

There were no demigods for the closing hours, to make audiences get  
religion: no Wayne Shorter or Keith Jarrett, no famous singer to rally  
around. The bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding, who recently won a  
surprise Grammy for best new artist, radiated the most star power of  
the weekend. (She played gracefully, not her usual tight pop show but  
two rambling sets with lots of guests, reaffirming her connection to  
the jazz world; afterward she gave advice to schoolchildren  
backstage.) The Brubeck Brothers Quartet, with their father, Dave, as  
guest — in the end, he didn’t show — were the only direct tie to the  
festival’s beginning years.

Instead, the festival organizers did the brave thing, putting their  
faith in where jazz is now: they booked a lot of bandleaders in their  
20s or 30s. Then they scheduled them awkwardly.

There was an extra mile not taken regarding patterns of taste, or  
possible continuities, or momentum. Why put Steve Coleman in the same  
time slot as Mr. Green, when Mr. Coleman is one of Mr. Green’s very  
few well-known disciples? Why end Day 1 with a duo of Al Di Meola and  
Gonzalo Rubalcaba playing glossy guitar-and-piano rhapsodies? Why — if  
not just to save money — book Trombone Shorty twice, since his New  
Orleans funk-rock band played nearly the same set two days in a row?  
(The pianist Hiromi played twice too, perhaps giving music students  
what they came for: canned, thundering virtuosity.)

Why not do much more with the natural connections between regional  
scenes and individual musicians to create narratives throughout the  
day? The good pop festivals can get this sort of thing almost  
scientifically right. Newport Jazz didn’t.

It’s in the details, sometimes. I was looking forward to hearing  
Miguel Zenón’s new music: versions of songs by 20th-century Puerto  
Rican composers reimagined for jazz quartet, with arrangements for 10  
woodwinds by Guillermo Klein. The quartet sits on the front line of  
sound and rhythm in jazz, and Mr. Klein doesn’t just write adequately  
for hire; when he composes something, you want to hear it. But even up  
close the woodwinds were mostly inaudible over the louder quartet, so  
I heard only half of what I came for.

Mr. Zenón is a brilliant saxophonist and composer, one of the best  
working in jazz. He won a MacArthur grant three years ago. And yet in  
his two appearances — one with his own group, one in an excellent  
three-way saxophone chase with Mr. Coleman and Ravi Coltrane — the  
M.C.’s, New England jazz radio D.J.’s, invented several new ways to  
mangle his name. The charitable assumption is that they don’t play Mr.  
Zenón’s music on their shows. Or maybe they just don’t know who he is.  
You want to hold Newport to the highest standards because it has been,  
and still could be, something to believe in. (Jazz audiences want  
something to believe in.)

And even if it isn’t necessarily the best jazz festival in the world,  
a lot of people want it to be good, including the publishing and  
broadcasting media. Consider how many albums in a reasonably good jazz  
record collection were recorded live at Newport. Then go to NPR’s Web  
site, which has been streaming and archiving many of the performances  
from this year’s festival, listen to the best ones — Mr. Coleman and  
Five Elements; the trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s new group, Triveni; John  
Hollenbeck’s 19-piece Large Ensemble — and consider that those could  
be in a good jazz record collection too.

Mr. Coleman, the alto saxophonist, played with his current A-list: the  
singer Jen Shyu, the trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, the pianist David  
Virelles, the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey.  
They were good, sometimes extravagantly so, in five long pieces held  
together by moving harmony like weather changes — you felt them down  
to your bones — and by Ms. Shyu’s singing, emotional and dramatic,  
though it came out in nontraditional scat syllables. Original as the  
whole thing was, Ms. Shyu’s connection to Sarah Vaughan shone through,  
as did Mr. Coleman’s to Charlie Parker.

Mr. Hollenbeck used voices, in a few different ways: Theo Bleckmann  
and Kate McGarry sang together with unusual techniques for most of his  
band’s set, changing the natural timbre of their voices or using them  
as sound color; several of the band’s soloists improvised with the  
same sense of freedom, as if they were singing too.

And Sangam, the trio of the saxophonist Charles Lloyd, the  
percussionist Zakir Hussain and the drummer Eric Harland, played and  
sang — for Mr. Hussain, there’s sometimes no difference — through a  
meditative set of Indian music and free improvisation out on the main  
stage on Sunday. It came during a lull in the rain and was one of the  
best stretches of the day. For a few minutes, I thought I understood  
why the festival once meant so much: no noise in the harbor, the  
audience rapt, no condescension or explanation from the stage, a sense  
that this moment might be bigger than music.