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Chicago Jazz Fest


Larry Kart

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Who else is going? I plan to be there all day and night Saturday and Sunday. Would like to catch Friday too, but that's the first night my freshman year stepchild plays in his high school marching band. 

I am going starting today. Planning to go as much as stamina allows which means i probably have to be a bit selective on the fly.

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What kind of marching are they doing? Old-school symmetrical or that modern drum corp abstraction?

I'm not sure. I did see a cell-phone video of a rehearsal (the band has a very strong, sound as big as a house, female trumpet soloist, reminds me of Manny Klein), but I'm not well-versed enough in marching band styles to say whether they're old school or modern. If I had to guess, I'd say old school. They do kick ass on a Beatles medley -- lots of good players, thanks to kids taking lots of  music lessons.

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Old school marching shows its military roots...loots of symetricality, shapes, block movements, counter marches, etc.

The drum corps style is really quite abstract, seems to be more about the movement than the results (or, more to the point, the movement IS the result). The music is pretty different too, I've seen drum corps routines set to a Bartok string quartet, stuff like that. Percussion pits on the sidelines for the mallet instruments, jsut really...not old-school marching, not even a little.

In my Music Ed training, we took a class on how to score a marching band routine (yes, score paper with a football field on it, and you write all the movements for all the people, with its own distinct notation). By the time my son did marching band, they had dropped that entirely and had moved on to drum corps style. The first time I saw it, I though that everybody was lost, I swear to god. But no, it's supposed to go like that. They move around, get to places stop and then move again, but never in anything really "linear", there's a lot of curves and swirls and things.

as for Chicago Jazz Fest, geez, I wished I lived in anything even remotely approaching driving range...eight hours or less, it's a day trip afaic. I'd be there.

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Chicago Jazz Fest notes for Saturday and Sunday (only days I could be there)

Saturday:

Afternoon highlights for me were Jason Roebke’s Octet with a lot of my Chicago favorites (bass clarinetist Jason Stein and trombonist Jeb Bishop in very strong form) and middle-aged veteran tenor and soprano saxophonist Brian Gephardt — Gephardt  not a strikingly original player (somewhat akin to Pete Christlieb perhaps)  but strong and genuine (he even has an attractive, Lucky Thompson-ish tone on soprano), and his band was really together and included an interesting trombonist, Tom Garling, and a very interesting ( both as comper and soloist) pianist, Karl Montzka. Gephardt has an album out with the same band, "Standing on Two Feet," which I bought and can recommend.

A little bit of Ryan Cohan and Joe Locke was enough for me.

In the evening caught most of the (so I thought) surprising relative revivification of Mark Turner. Not sure I particularly like what he’s into now as a soloist, but it’s interesting bordering on strange and above all active, versus the uniformly grey stuff I heard from him at Constellation last November (I think it was, with the same band  but with Avishai Cohen on trumpet). Perhaps Turner's rather stiff but peppy new trumpeter Jason Palmer helped. Turner's  pieces (perhaps better, ensemble frameworks) do remain remarkably grey IMO, and they often go on for a LONG time.

Before that was the Claudia Quintet doing their Kenneth Patchen material. A bit arch for my tastes, with Kurt Elling joining in with T. Bleckmann on recitations/vocals (though Elling certainly has presentational  flair, in this reminded me some of Stan Freberg) but there was undeniable talent up there -- especially bassist Drew Gress, vibraharpist Mat Moran, and the leader. Didn't stick around for Dee Dee Bridgewater.

 

Sunday: Afternoon highlights were vocalist Elaine Dame -- a youngish, warm, real jazz singer -- veteran pianist Bob Dogan's band with tenorist Julie Wood and bass trumpter Ryan Schultz, and later, Schultz's own fusion-inclined band, which had sound problems though no  fault of its own  but included Karl Montzka, who again was terrific, this time on electric piano and Hammond organ. Ashamed to say I didn't know of this Chicago-area player until now.

 

Tomeka Reid leading the Kenwood High Band in a program of pieces by AACM composers. Those kids killed it. One so-to-speak "conduction "piece, cued by Reid's expressive gestures, was especially effective.

Evening: The Jeff Parker Trio was soporific, which for my taste often has been the case when Parker is the leader, though I've heard him play brilliantly in other contexts. Jane Bunnett with the all-female Cuban ensemble Maqueque (rhythm instruments plus piano) -- Maqueque was  quite good; I like Bunnett's virtuosic flute solos but can't stand her on soprano.

Next was French vocalist Cyrille Aimee -- yuck. Other than that, non-profane words fail me.

Muhal's Experiment Band -- one long piece (about an hour). Several longeurs -- a  percussion intro by Thurman Barker and Reggie Nicholson, good but too long IMO, a long,demanding mostly unaccompanied flute solo played by Wallace McMillan (the line itself quite striking but again it went on very long, and I'm not sure that McMillan's execution didn't falter some at times), and a longish trombone solo by George Lewis that consisted almost entirely of strangled, semi-flatulent tones. Yes, I've heard Lewis do that before but not exclusively and not for that long. Then, thanks be, heroic solo trumpet from Wadada Leo Smith, which almost brought tears to my eyes. Ancient to the Future indeed. After which, entwined alto saxophonists  Henry Threadgill and Roscoe Mitchell, the former angular and abrupt, the latter soaring and almost Johnny Hodges-like, with lovely expressive variations in timbre. Threadgill's subsequent solo in the same vein as in the ensemble passage was brilliant; Mitchell, stepping out a bit more from his prior ensemble role, was brilliant, too. Toward the end, cascading virtuosic solo piano work from Muhal and Amina Claudine Myers.

 

 

Edited by Larry Kart
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I wish he'd provide the profane specifics when the non-profane ones fail him. Contrary to some belief systems, profane expression can be both very specific and very useful as both an expressive and as a descriptive mechanism.

OTOH, if it's gonna take off from something along these lines, hmmm...probably better left alone. The line between profane and vulgar is sometimes best discerned when one is not walking right on top of it.


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enjoyed the festival quite a lot starting thursday with Marquis Hill's blacktet and Henry Butler & Steven Bernstein & the hot9.  both highly entertaining sets;

started early on Friday, did a little hopping between venues and dug everything

The Craig Taburn trio was excellent;

on the main stage the Chico and George Freeman set was the bomb.

caught Kidd Jordan, Jeff Parker Josh Abrams and Alvin Fielders after fest at Constellation. Beautiful imo.

Muhal's eperimental band for me delivered everything that i had hoped for. great music.

 

 

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This was my last year working on the festival. We were sort of morally bound to emphasize AACM musicians since this is the 50th anniversary, and the rest of the fest was plotted with that in mind.

Monday lead-in at Pianoforte: Paul Asaro, piano, and Kim Cusack, clarinet, swung through mostly songs by pianists: Waller, Hines, James P. Johnson. Often you hear a set at the beginning that makes you think, 'Oh, yes, we're going to have a real festival now.' This was the set.

1st night: Marquis Hill, Young Lion trumpeter, and band played hot hard bop. Then a crazy set of Henry Butler veering from Cecil Taylor runs and tone clusters to New Orleans rock, accompanied by Steve Bernstein's Hot 9 and including 'Wolverine Blues.' Cheerful - the whole affair reminded some folks of Sun Fa.

2nd day: heard enough of Craig Taborn Trio to last me awhile. Art Davis played some fine melodic trumpet in a Clark Terry tribute. Chico Freeman, in his lyrical mood,  and his uncle George Freeman, the combination Monk-Basie of the guitar, played a colorful set. The Strayhorn tribute was somewhat disappointing, the Steven Bernstein arrangement (forget which song 'twas) was the commission that really stood out. Fred Hersh played the first 'Lonely Woman' I heard this weekend, also a nice arrangement of 'Forerunner' and an elaborate lead-in that I liked to a Monk song. Jose James repeated licks over and over and over etc. etc. etc. and was the second-worst singer I ever heard at a Chicago Jazz Festival (Dianne Schuur, many years ago, was worst). After the fest, heard a set of chaos at Constellation, Kidd Jordan drowned out by many other horn players.

3rd day: Edward Wilkerson played a hell of a lot of tenor in Trio WAZ. Jason Roebke's Octet was one of the 2 or 3 high points of the festival. Roebke had composed provocative, sort of Dolphylike themes, and now it seems to me he's become a more expansive composer and he still has solid interpreters like Josh Berman, Keefe Jackson, Greg Ward. Kidd finally became audible in Douglas Ewart's group, which played the second 'Lonely Woman' as a reggae piece. Kurt Elling was a good actor reading some Kenneth Patchen poems, including one old favorite. Heard the last 20 minutes or so of Mark Turner and felt nothing, then Dee Dee Bridgewater hurt my eardrums so I left.

4th day: Kidd, Jason Adasiewicz, Frank Rosaly, and Josh Abrams played an hour at Fred Anderson Park - quirkyl, just the way I like it.  Ewart's 'Red Hills' was the conduction that Larry mentioned and I felt the same as he did about the Kenwood high school band and about Parker and Bunnett-Maqueque. I quite enjoyed the half-hour of Cyrille Aimee's French-gypsyish jazz that I heard, including a wow of a guitar solo. Abrams' Experimental Band left the whole festival with a glow. The 3 saxophonists, Threadgill, Mitchell, McMillan, especially shared a feeling for space and altered sound (I almost said 'distorted sound') and line. But everybody sounded gret to me.

I forget who played the 3rd 'Lonely Woman' of the festival. Nobody got all the notes right. Today I see e-mails from people who hated the Experimental Band and the 'Black Lives Matter' rap in Ewart's set, but forget those people.

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Man, I wish this wasn't always the same weekend as my hometown Detroit Jazz Festival.  Ran into a bunch of people from Chicago in Detroit who preferred the lineup here to the one there, and had friends in Detroit who split for Chicago to see the AACM tribute and the rest of the lineup there.  But since the festival in Detroit has been such a labor of love for so many of my family's friends, I know where I'm going to end up every Labor Day, even if I might slightly prefer to be down the road a piece.

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  • 2 years later...

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