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Caught Egberto Gismonti and Jane Bunnett Toronto’s Art of Jazz Fest Embraces India, Cuba and Brazil Seated serenely onstage at Toronto’s Art Of Jazz festival on June 8, the classical Indian music professor and percussion master Trichy Sankaran faced his daughter and explained the history of the talking drum and his daughter’s role as the hand-clapping beat keeper. He then launched into a breathtakingly nimble call-andresponse solo using just his voice and drum. The performance opened the second set of a concert headlined by Egberto Gismonti, an honoree of the festival who was being presented with a lifetime achievement award. Gismonti joined Sankaran and his daughter, and soon also welcomed festival co-producer Jane Bunnett, the Penderecki String Quartet, multi-instrumentalist Don Thompson and Cuban vocal choir Grupo Vocal Desandann to a show that ultimately highlighted the Toronto music scene’s diverse array of cultural influences as much as it paid tribute to Gismonti’s compositions. This unique amalgam of sounds is the most outstanding aspect of the Toronto’s musical makeup. The three-year-old festival, which was conceived of and produced by Bonnie Lester and Canadian jazz super-couple Bunnett and Larry Cramer, emphasized those facets of the city’s musical personality. Gismonti’s show closed out a series of clinics, free and ticketed performances, and latenight jams presented over four days in Toronto’s Distillery District, which was small enough to keep the events self-contained so that festivalgoers could easily catch a snippet of most performances. The program was loosely structured around music and events related to the festival’s three lifetime achievement honorees: Gismonti, composer Hermeto Pascoal and John Norris, the founder of Coda magazine. Cuban jazz abounded during the festival, as Bunnett has always been an advocate for that country’s culture. Two free salsa drumming classes for children and an Afro-Cuban party featuring Cuban-Canadian players like Luis Mario Ochoa and Alberto Alberto shone a light on Toronto’s thriving Cuban music community. Female bandleaders were also featured. Cindy Blackman played a tight Sunday afternoon set with a mix of New York and Toronto artists who backed her up as she deftly switched from brushed ballad to rolling swing to angular jazz-rock as her sold-out audience stared in silent awe. Another drummer, Brazilian– Canadian percussionist Aline Morales, got her audience to their feet as she led her own band as well as the maracatu group Nunca Antes in the folk music of her native Pernambuco region. On the outdoor Women In Jazz Stage around the corner, the Vancouver-born bassist Brandi Disterheft and her band channeled Flora Purim when she wasn’t showing off material from her more traditional album Debut. The small but earnest festival did a commendable job of representing the multicultural character of the city. Unfortunately, it also faced major competition from Luminata, a nearby corporate-funded music festival featuring acts like Leonard Cohen and Morris Day and the Time. But as a breathless Bunnett pointed out between sets with Gismonti on the closing night, the entire event was staged by a handful of people who did the work not for financial gain but because it was something they felt they needed to do. As Gismonti told students at a master class one day during the festival, “There’s no bad music. There’s no good music. There’s music that you need.” —Jennifer Odell ALAN DUNLOP JACK VARTOOGIAN/FRONTROWPHOTOS Kidd Jordan Steamy Vision Festival Cheers on Kidd Jordan Underground and proud since its 1994 launch, New York’s Vision Festival has never found a venue with adequate infrastructure to support the talent that performs under its auspices. Such was the case at this year’s crowded six-day convocation in the unairconditioned theater in Soto Clemente Vélez Cultural Center, which continues to serve the working class and artist populations that remain in Manhattan’s rampantly gentrifying Lower East Side. Performing in steambath conditions during a record June heat wave were a range of speculative improv movers and shakers in complete command of their own hard-won musical argot. The temperature possibly exceeded 100 degrees on stage on night two, when tenor saxophonist Edward “Kidd” Jordan, this year’s lifetime achievement awardee on June 11, began the first of four high-energy sets, joined by Hamiet Bluiett on baritone saxophone, Dave Burrell on piano and Maynard Chatters on piano strings. In 1976, Jordan brought Bluiett, Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill and David Murray to New Orleans for the concert that gestated the World Saxophone Quartet. As an indication of what he might have sounded like with WSQ, Jordan opened with a 16-bar phrase in the upper harmonic partials. Bluiett riposted in his own upper register for another eight bars, Burrell threw down dark ostinato clusters and a fanfare ensued. Propelled by Burrell’s spiky signifying, Bluiett and Jordan uncorked precisely executed unisons in the overtone series, way low one moment, falsetto the next. At about nine minutes, the ambiance turned momentarily rubato, and the saxmen recontextualized “Wade In The Water,” Jordan playing the melody, Bluiett presenting a counterline. Later, a Bluiett riff from the World Sax Quartet lexicon precipitated a 22 DOWNBEAT September 2008
collective abstraction, concluding with a parse of “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.” At the start of the second set, Jordan’s T-shirt was barely sweat-lined. Violinist Billy Bang started an Albert Aylerian refrain, bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake steered the flow straight to the outer partials, and it stayed there. Bang cued rhythmic environments with ferocious riffs, Parker and Drake synchronously transitioned from one killer groove—ametric post-Murray and post- Shannon Jackson funk—to another. Jordan wailed without letup until the ninth minute, when he laid out. He sipped water as Bang threw down an outrageously intense fiddlestomp. Jordan caught the spirit on his solo, climaxed, worried the phrase over Bang’s pizzicato vamp and caught the spirit again. Twenty minutes later, New Orleans trumpeter Clyde Kerr performed a gold-toned fiveminute prologue evocative of Booker Little and Don Cherry, ballasted by post-Webern chording from pianist Joel Futterman, rumbly lines from Parker, and multidirectional drum painting from Gerald Cleaver, a last-minute substitute for Fielder. Using evocative Cecil Taylor–Alex Schlippenbach language, Futterman set the stage for Jordan, who hurled himself into Interstellar Space mode. Jordan occupied Coltrane-land for the next six minutes, eventually referencing “Resolution” with a “Meditations”-like cry. Jordan sat out the next set, which featured his sons, trumpeter Marlon and flutist-piccolist Kent, both virtuosos oriented toward elaborating upon ’60s jazz modernism in the manner of Wynton and Branford Marsalis when they hit New York 25 years ago. For the denouement, Jordan locked horns with tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, supported by Parker, Drake and Bang. Anderson launched a ferocious monologue, Jordan did the same. The conversation continued unabated. —Ted Panken Schaffhauser Festival Makes Bold Case for Swiss Improv FRANCESCA PFEFFER Barry Guy and Irène Schweizer An opening gala concert says much about whether a jazz festival is about making a statement, or just doing business. By presenting Schaffhausen-born Irène Schweizer as a solo pianist and guest artist with London Jazz Composers Orchestra in the formal, yet intimate Stadttheater to commence its 19th edition on May 21, the Schaffhauser Jazzfestival in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, used bold italics to state its mission of placing Swiss musicians in the vanguard of European jazz. The festival also ended the decade-long dormancy of the Barry Guy-directed LJCO through commissioning the bassist’s “Radio Rondo.” After her riveting prelude-like solo, Schweizer applied her pan-stylistic approach to Guy’s challenging, player-empowering score. Though Guy retained the form’s traditional utility as a soloist’s showcase on “Radio Rondo,” he expanded the scope of the rondo’s back and forth to feature Schweizer in several subgroupings—a pummeling quintet passage with Guy, bassist Barre Phillips, and drummers Paul Lytton and Lucas Niggli—as well as encounters with the full force of the 17-piece contingent. In the latter, Guy cued single-note stabs, flurried textures and a host of other events from parts of the orchestra, spiking the power of the notated materials. For all of the piece’s intensity, Guy slipped in beautiful passages—like the plaintive melody stated by tenor saxophonist Simon Picard—into the piece, and the magisterial theme that set up the piece’s final tutti blast. Still, idiomatic ensembles play a less central role in “Radio Rondo” than in Guy’s “Harmos,” which was performed after intermission. Although it has numerous spaces for smallgroup improvisations, the exchange between tenor saxophonist Evan Parker and longtime trio mates Guy and Lytton had the crowd-rousing impact of the all-star combo feature in a big band show. This early-’90s chestnut also hinges on a refreshingly grand theme, eliciting searing solos from saxophonists Trevor Watts and Peter McPhail. Although the diversity of Swiss jazz was front-and-center in the remaining three days of concerts in the casual Kammgarn and the Haberhaus, multinational collaboration was also the subtext of such persuasive ensembles as pianist Sylvie Courvoisier’s Lonelyville and the collective quartet In Transit. In Transit’s free improvisations had strong post-Coltrane jazz flavors, giving saxophonist Jürg Solothummann, pianist Michael Jefry Stevens, bassist Daniel Studer and drummer Dieter Ulrich ample opportunities to stretch as soloists and ensemble players. Overall, in presenting music spanning pianist Colin Vallon’s Trio’s churning originals and pop covers and Stephan Kurmann Strings’ homage to Hermeto Pascoal, Schaffhauser Jazzfestival made an impressive case for the vitality of Swiss jazz. —Bill Shoemaker September 2008 DOWNBEAT 23
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Page 24 and 25: Players Ed Reed ; Singing for Keeps
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Page 58 and 59: Woodshed MASTER CLASS by Pete Malin
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