Newport #Jazz Festival 2016: So many stages, so little time

Whether you prefer a musical smorgasbord – a bit of this, a smidgen of that, or prefer to camp out for a full set of a favorite artist – the 2016 edition of the Newport Jazz Festival has something for everyone. With more than 50 different groups scheduled to appear July 29-31, there can be a lot of ground to cover or filter through. Every jazz-related genre is covered, no matter your style preferences.

There are three outdoor stages at Fort Adams State Park and on Saturday and Sunday, there’s an intimate Storyville stage tucked inside a former yachting museum. This principally is a solo piano and small group showcase location that only holds about 100 people, so waiting lines are common.

Tierney Sutton

This year's traditional Friday night event downtown at the Newport Tennis Hall of Fame, the historic Newport Casino site that hosted George Wein’s first Newport festival back in 1954, features singer Gregory Porter’s band and pianist Chick Corea’s trio with bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade. Both groups are also on the Saturday menu at Fort Adams.

Edmar Castaneda

I’ll be at NJF this month for the 35^th time in 36 years. I started covering the festival when Wein returned to Newport in 1981 after a 10-year absence. As a photographer on assignment, there are often mad dashes between stages. I’m used to it now, but return to savor more of an interesting set as time permits.

Here are some of the groups I most want to hear:

• Corea’s spartan, high-energy trio. Chick turned 75 last month but has never slowed down. McBride and Blade add interesting personalities to the musical chemistry. Both have much to say as leaders or sidemen. (McBride also is succeeding Wein as the festival’s artistic director.)
• Three Caribbean jazz-related bands: trumpeter Etienne Charles and Creole Soul (Friday), Monty Alexander’s Harlem-Kingston Express (Saturday) and Cuban-born saxophonist Yosvany Terry’s quintet (Sunday).
• Singer Tierney Sutton’s “After Blue” Joni Mitchell Project with guitarist Serge Merlaud and cellist Mark Summer (a Turtle Island String Quartet co-founder who left that band last fall to pursue a solo career). Sutton has been a favorite vocal performer for decades, yet this is her Newport debut. Her Friday performance is long overdue. She's also guesting with The Hot Sardines on Saturday.
• Los Angeles tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington. His triple-CD The Epic ranked as one of 2015’s top albums in virtually all critics polls. He and his band perform at Fort Adams on Friday and on Sunday.
• Saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s group. (Friday). The hard-edged, versatile tenor player is always a treat to hear. This band is of particular interest, because it backed David Bowie on his epitaph recording project, Blackstar.
• Colombian harpist Edmar Castaneda’s World Ensemble. Due to his blend of musicality and enthusiasm, there may be no more exhilarating performer to witness in jazz (Saturday).
• Saxophonist Chris Potter’s supergroup with bassist Dave Holland, guitarist Lionel Loueke and drummer Eric Harland (Sunday).
• Pianists Sullivan Fortner, Henry Butler, Rossano Sportiello and Toshiko Akiyoshi.

Other mainstream treats will include pianist Kenny Barron’s trio and the venerable Heath Brothers (Friday) with saxophonist Jimmy Heath also guesting with the Rhode Island Music Educators Association student big band on Saturday morning). There’s also the prodigious pianist Joey Alexander, clarinetist Anat Cohen’s tentet and the John Scofield/Joe Lovano Sextet.

Besides Porter and Sutton, jazz vocals fans have the music of Jose James, Norah Jones, Angelique Kidjo and Lizz Wright to savor. 

Donny McCaslin

Chick Corea

Chris Potter

Check out the festival website to see the full roster of 2016 performers because there’s an abundance of riches.

CDs of Note - Short Takes

Taking a look at new CD projects by Jim Clayton, Bill Evans, June Garber, Lisa Lindsley, Mike Moreno and Ernie Watts…

Jim Clayton, Lenny Jumps In (Clay-Tone)

Toronto-based Jim Clayton finds great musical inspiration in the delights and interests of his young daughter. The germination of those efforts came with his delightful 2014 release, Songs My Daughter Knows. Now he’s back with another gem, Lenny Jumps In. The gems here include the funky “Louisiana Cat Club,” The DeRozan Effect” (written for young Lenny’s favorite Toronto Raptor, guard DeMar DeRozan) and Clayton’s take on Kenny Loggins’ “Return to Pooh Corner.” Also, be sure to check out “Miss Kelly’s House,” a waltz that was inspired by his daughter’s visits to the home of Kelly Peterson, the widow of the great Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. Clayton’s band includes guitarist Andrew Scott, bassist Steve Lucas, drummer David Peters and percussionist Paul Ormandy

Bill Evans, Some Other Time (Resonance)

If you’re like me, the piano jazz of Bill Evans never gets tired. Every listen brings out crafty nuances within his deep, careful melodic invention. So imagine the delight in hearing Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest, a recording that sat in a safe in Germany for nearly 50 years. Resonance Records acquired it, and released this two-CD set this spring. It features Evans, performing in solo, duo and trio contexts in June 1968 at the MPS Studios in Villingen, Germany, while on tour in Europe.

Evans’ trio at the time included drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Eddie Gomez. DeJohnette was in this trio for just six months – and this was his only studio session with Evans. It includes Evans’ only recording of “These Foolish Things.” His solo explorations are “Lover Man” and “It’s All Right With Me.” The trio's take on the standard “How About You?” reveals the pianist’s stylistic evolution toward a more percussive attack to the piano, as CD annotator Marc Myers describes, “egged on by Mr. DeJohnette’s peppery cymbal work.” This is a great addition to the Evans discography.

June Garber, This I Know (self-produced)

Happiness, joy, grief, melancholy and sadness are all part of the adult experience. June Garber has experienced them all – and on this CD, the Toronto-based singer shares them in a cathartic way. It no doubt helped her move beyond the sudden loss of her husband, Bob Doherty, nearly three years ago. Some of the joy comes out on tunes from or inspired by her childhood in South Africa – “Underneath the Jacaranda Tree” and “Meadowlands.” Other treats include her poignant take on Hoagy Carmichael’s classic “Baltimore Oriole” and a clever medley pairing Adele’s “Rumour Has It” with the Peggy Lee-associated torch anthem “Fever.”

Her core band – pianist Mark Kieswetter, bassist George Koller and drummer Ben Wittman – is joined by a variety of special guests on various tracks. This project also finds Garber in a slightly different musical role. She co-wrote two of the tunes – “Underneath the Jacaranda Tree” and “Unbroken” – and she took a subtler approach to vocals, meshing herself into the band rather than riding roughshod over the instrumentals as too many vocalists do. This fresh approach serves her well.

Lisa Lindsley, Long After Midnight (Take One)

Five years after her stunning debut CD, Everytime We Say Goodbye, Lisa Lindsley is back with a very different gem. The Californian’s newest CD was recorded while she spent a year living in Paris (2013-14), finding gigs and musicians she enjoyed working with. She was joined by pianist Laurent Marode, drummer Mourad Benhammou and reed player Esaie Cid, and brought in Bay Area bassist Jeff Chambers for this session. Lindsley put her own varied emotional stamp on a variety of American standards, plus two tunes written by guitarist James Wilson, a native Californian who now teaches music at the American School of Paris. They are the title track, co-written by Tricia Lee Sampson, and “Skylark Song.” Her selections also included Donovan’s 1966 pop hit “Mellow Yellow.” She twists each tune to emphasize her own various moods. Dig the spare, wistful, what-might-have-been treatment of “The House is Haunted (By The Echo of Your Last Goodbye)” – and her playful take on the Jule Styne-Leo Robin classic “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

Mike Moreno, Lotus (World Culture)

Houston native Mike Moreno brings chops and a world-music feel to the table on Lotus, a quartet CD that teams the guitarist with pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Doug Weiss and drummer Eric Harland. Favorites include the title track, “The Empress” and “Can We Stay Forever?” – thoughtful soundscapes that shimmer with invention. New York-based Moreno wrote all nine tracks on this, his fifth CD as a leader.

Ernie Watts, Wheel of Time (Flying Dolphin)

Ernie Watts’ bittersweet tenor sax sound was a hallmark of Charlie Haden’s longtime small band, Quartet West – and it continues to serve Watts well on his own outpouring of CDs. The latest, Wheel of Time, teams Watts with his first-call European rhythm section of nearly 20 years: pianist Christof Saenger, bassist Rudi Engel and drummer Heinrich Koebberling. All four players contributed compositions to the project, which also includes covers of Joe Henderson’s “Inner Urge” and Toronto pianist Adrean Farrugia’s whimsical “Goose Dance.” The highlight is the title track, “Wheel of Time” (subtitled “Anthem for Charlie”) – a pensive homage to the late Charlie Haden that Watts co-wrote with Seattle-based pianist Marc Seales. It’s a thing of beauty.

A most-unexpected tip of many jazz hats....

Each June, the Jazz Journalists Association holds a matinee program in Manhattan to honor journalists, broadcasters and photographers who have done distinguished work in the past year.

Wednesday afternoon's festivities at the Blue Note jazz club included an unexpected surprise. JJA's voting members selected yours truly as the 2016 winner of the Lona Foote-Bob Parent Award for Jazz Photography.

When my name surfaced with five other very talented nominees (John Abbott, Jimmy Katz, Richard Conde, Lauren Deutsch and Michael Jackson) several months ago on the JJA Awards ballot, I figured it was a mistake, since I won the award back in 2003.

More than a few JJA member photographers had been under the impression this was sort of a lifetime achievement award, one and done. Apparently not - or maybe the JJA Awards committee forgot that caveat.

New Jersey-based photographer and writer Mitchell Seidel, with whom I've shared concert photo pits dating back to 1985, shared an interesting perspective: something along the lines that winning a lifetime achievement award twice in one lifetime is quite a feat.


I am humbled by the honor, knowing full well that each of the five other nominees was just as deserving.

As best I can surmise, my book, "Jazz in the Key of Light," must have developed some degree of awareness within the JJA community over the past year and a half. Maybe the voters took note of a 30+ year commitment to writing about and photographing the jazz world. We'll never know with any certainty.

Here is the full list this year's winners in the various categories:

• Lifetime achievement in jazz journalism: Ted Panken
• Jazz periodical: DownBeat
• Jazz blog: Ethan Iverson‘s “Do the Math”
• Jazz book: “Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth,” by John Szwed
• Robert Palmer-Helen Oakley Dance Award for Excellence in Writing in 2015: Nate Chinen
• Willis Conover-Marian McPartland Award for Broadcasting in 2015: Linda Yohn, WEMU, Ypsilanti, MI
• Lona Foote-Bob Parent Award for Photography in 2015: Ken Franckling
• Jazz Photo of the Year: Patrick Marek
• Jazz Album Art of the Year: Mike Park, for Kamasi Washington, The Epic

For more details, including all of the musician winners announced earlier this spring, visit the JJA online. Composer/orchestra leader Maria Schneider took home a whopping five trophies this time around: for Musician, Composer, Arranger, Large Ensemble and Record of the Year, the latter for her exquisite CD The Thompson Fields (artistShare).

The Miles Davis legacy, still vibrant after all these years

Trumpeter, bandleader and jazz innovator Miles Davis would have turned 90 today (May 26), had he not passed away nearly 25 years ago. That quarter-century absence from the jazz scene arrives on September 28, 2016.

His music continues to resonate for lovers of his various styles of performance: bop, cool bop, modal jazz, hard bop, electronic fusion, and instrumental pop music. He was one of the pivotal figures in modern jazz. Miles was a charming, frustrating enigma – blessed with one of the sweetest tones ever heard on trumpet and dogged by a "Prince of Darkness" persona that was as much a buffer guarding his private space as it was a mystique.

On this Milestone day, here’s an opportunity to check out or revisit the 4,000-word profile I prepared just before his 60^th birthday. The four-hour interview experience was quite illuminating about the man and his music. I’m also sharing a few images from that April 7, 1986 afternoon in Manhattan.

 

Happy 90^th, Miles. wherever your spirit resides today. It certainly resides in countless musical hearts, given the relentless interest in the music.

 Photos © Ken Franckling 1986, all rights reserved.

CDs of Note – Short Takes

Tis the season for jazz tribute recordings. Taking a look at CD projects honoring the musical legacies of Jackie McLean, Marian McPartland, Oscar Peterson, Dinah Washington, Grover Washington Jr. and Attila Zoller.... 

Opening a month-long tribute to a jazz legend

James Suggs

Much attention will be paid throughout May to the musical legacy of trumpeter Miles Davis, who would have turned 90 this May 26. His musical legacy remains so strong today that it sometimes is hard to fathom that he left us a quarter-century ago - on September 28, 1991.

Trumpeter James Suggs assembled a fine quintet to honor Davis's imprint on mainstream jazz and shared music from the horn legend at a Sunday, May 1 concert co-sponsored by the Tampa (FL) Jazz Club, WUSF's "All Night Jazz" program and Hillsborough Community College's Visual and Performing Arts Series.