I can’t say how healthy jazz is economically — that’s not my area of expertise — but after attending this year’s Newport Jazz Festival, I can state with absolute confidence that it’s doing very well aesthetically. And there were enough enthusiastic fans at Newport to reassure me that the music still has an audience.
Where to begin? At the beginning, I suppose, which for my Significant Other and me was Saturday morning at 11:30. (Not being Chris Botti devotees, we skipped the festival’s official opening on Friday night.) Straight off the bat, things were cooking, courtesy of the Dave Holland-Gonzalo Rubalcaba-Chris Potter-Eric Harland quartet on the main stage. This is not a working band — they had played together only once before, last year at Monterey — but you wouldn’t know it to hear how deftly they worked together. Nothing innovative here, but a lot of good, solid playing, and a great way to get the festival started.
(We would end up seeing and hearing a lot more of Chris Potter, one of the more underrated saxophonists on the scene, before the weekend was over. But that’s a subject for another blog.)
Even more impressive was Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band on the Pavilion Stage, the first of several outstanding bands that, somewhat to our embarrassment, we had managed to miss every time they performed in New York. We won’t make that mistake again.
Brian Blade is an exceptional drummer: powerful but never overpowering, alternately subtle or demonstrative depending on what the music calls for, and always swinging. And as we discovered on Saturday, he’s a hell of a writer, too. Indeed, despite the presence of some exceptional soloists, notably Kurt Rosenwinkel on guitar, I thought the most notable thing about the Fellowship Band, at least as heard at Newport, was the writing, most of it by Blade. Some of the pieces had a folklike, pastoral quality — a little like Pat Metheny’s music, but with more of a blues undercurrent. Others were more sophisticated in structure, marked by long, flowing melody lines. The band played a long set — longer than its allotted hour and ten minutes — and held the audience entranced from start to finish.
After that we elected to stay where we were, even though Wayne Shorter was performing on the main stage. It takes a lot to get me to miss Shorter, who is certainly one of the most original saxophonists of our time and perhaps the greatest living jazz composer, and whose quartet is always full of surprises. But the one-time-only trio of Charlie Haden on bass, Bill Frisell on guitar and Ethan Iverson on piano was performing on the Pavilion Stage, and that combination was too enticing to miss.
Since the trio’s set was scheduled to start at 2:10 and Shorter’s at 2:30, scores of festival attendees tried to have it both ways, catching a little of the trio and then heading over to the main stage. Unfortunately, this resulted in a steady stream of walkouts, starting after the trio finished its second number and continuing throughout their set. It was distracting to me, and it had to have been disheartening to the musicians, to see the size of their audience keep shrinking and shrinking.
Maybe more people would have stayed if the trio’s performance had been more compelling. Sadly, this was one of those cases where the whole was somehow smaller than the sum of its parts. On paper, Haden-Frisell-Iverson seemed like an ideal mix, especially since Haden had worked with both Frisell and Iverson in the past. (I don’t know if Iverson and Frisell had ever worked together.) But for some reason the music never gelled; there were some lovely moments, especially Haden’s solo on “My Old Flame,” but everyone — especially Iverson, who as the junior member of the team may have felt a bit intimidated — seemed to be holding back. It was a kick to see three such gifted musicians joining forces; I just wish they had done so with a little more, well, force.
The only complete set we caught after that (we saw a little bit of the young singer Melody Gardot’s performance on the Waterside Stage and were less than overwhelmed) was Aretha Franklin’s, which of course was the day’s finale, and which rocked. At 66, Aretha may have lost a step or two (and gained more than a pound or two), but she can still legitimately claim the title Queen of Soul.
Perhaps in unspoken response to the question of whether she belonged at a jazz festival, she sang not only the expected litany of hits but also a couple of standards, “Cherokee” and “My Funny Valentine.” The former was taken at a blistering tempo, which she handled with aplomb; the latter was skillfully rendered but marred by an excessive theatricality that turned it into more of a vocal exercise than a song — too much shouting, too many extra notes. But God bless her for deviating from the tried and true. And by the way, she sang the hell out of the tried-and-true stuff. She must surely have gotten sick of “Respect” and “Natural Woman” years ago, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way she sang them at Newport.
All in all, Saturday was an awfully good day at Newport. And Sunday would turn out to be even better.
Photos by Irene Trudel
