Portland Jazz Festival will top off its celebration of Blue Note Records with a finale performance by former Blue Note artist and Portland native Kurt Elling performing his tribute to the 1963 collaboration between saxophone great John Coltrane and baritone Johnny Hartman. A similar performance by Elling was one of the highlights of last year's Monterey Jazz Festival.
The concert recreates many of the ballads on the 1963 recording, Dedicated to You, which was recorded just over a year before Coltrane produced his seminal recording A Love Supreme. Unlike that transcendent effort, the Hartman collaboration was a more intimate and accessible album, a mood captured by Elling and his instrumental partner Ernie Watts.
Elling is widely regarded as one of the top jazz vocalists today, having won multiple Downbeat critic's polls and Jazz Times reader polls as well as seven Grammy nominations. He has performed twice before at the Portland Jazz Festival. For more information. Read more »
When it comes to jazz festivals that last only one day — or, in this case, only 10 hours — it’s hard to beat the NYC Winter Jazzfest for ambition or star power.
The 2009 edition of this one-night bash, as in past years, is timed to coincide with the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference. The conference, which draws presenters, promoters, talent buyers, educators, and musicians from around the word, runs from Jan. 9-13 in Manhattan. The Jazzfest, designed as a showcase for underexposed (if not necessarily unknown) jazz and experimental musicians, runs from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. on the night of Jan. 10.
Since it began in 2005, the festival has been held at the Knitting Factory in TriBeCa. The Knitting Factory is moving to Brooklyn, but the festival is not following. Rather, it is moving from TriBeCa a few blocks north to Greenwich Village and expanding from one venue to three, all within easy walking distance: Le Poisson Rouge (the site of the old Village Gate, once one of the city’s top jazz rooms), Kenny’s Castaways and Sullivan Hall.
Wayne Shorter, Rubén Blades, and the Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés will be among the performers at the sixth annual Panama Jazz Festival, which begins Jan. 12 and continues through Jan. 17.
The presence of Shorter’s remarkable quartet on the Panama bill is hardly surprising, since the pianist in that group is Danilo Pérez, a native of Panama who founded the festival and whose foundation coordinates its educational activities. Nonetheless, it has to be considered a coup for a festival, and a country, that don’t always get a lot of attention.
Putting an emphasis on tight fiscal policy in the face of worsening economic conditions, Riviera Beach has decided to cancel the Riviera Beach Music Festival.
After providing funding for the festival during its last eight years, city councillors have decided that it was not willing to commit $75,000 that it had initially allocated to the festival's advisory committee as part of the municipal budget. The festival was seen as a financial risk in light of a changing venue and rough weather that has led to a net loss from every edition since the festival began.
After eight years, city taxpayers have lost almost $1.5 million to the production of the festival, but things turned downhill to a a noticeable extent only within the last three. In 2006, the city gave more than $750,000 and the program was hit with delay and storms, causing headliner Patti LaBelle to finish her set early. The year after, fierce winds actually blew the stage down, with the city's issuance of refunds adding even more pain to city coffers. Read more »
The seven-year-old Savannah Music Festival has established a reputation for interesting programming crossing diverse musical boundaries, but their just-announced 2009 program may be the event's most interesting and most diverse yet. With top artists in various genres of jazz, roots, blues, world music, and classical, the upcoming festival, set for March 19 to April 5, 2009, puts a feather in the historic city's cultural cap.
The event's more than 100 performances are programmed in themes, series and special events. Some of the highlights are as follows:
In roots categories, Long Time Travelin' is a celebration of American folk song traditions featuring Rayna Gellert of Uncle Earl, gospel bluegrasser Doyle Lawson and hosted by Americana singer-songwriter Jim Lauderback, while Roots & Twang is a concert serieis featuring Neko Case and Crooked Fingers, Punch Brothers with Chris Thile, The Infamous Stringdusters, The Lovell Sisters and more. Read more »
For its 2009 season, Jazz Aspen Snowmass will change its locations and change and lengthen the dates of its June Festival, while its Labor Day Festival will be shortened by a day to compensate for the new resources being directed to the June Festival.
The venue change sees the festival's major artists playing in the Benedict Music Tent in Aspen's West End, which was borrowed from the classical Aspen Music Festival when Snowmass's June Festival launched in 1991. The festival has taken place at the Rio Grande Park in Aspen every previous summer going back to 2002.
Also, while it has usually spanned an extended weekend, the festival will expand its run-time from four days to seven, with concerts taking place on June 18-20 and June 25-28. Read more »
Seventieth anniversaries are not usually considered a big deal — at least not compared to 75th or 50th ones — but if the folks at Blue Note Records want to treat the label’s 70th as a big deal, who’s going to complain?
There’s an additional hook to the Blue Note celebrations planned for next year: Not only is 2009 the 70th anniversary of the label’s founding by Alfred Lion; it is also the 25th anniversary of its rebirth as an active label under the direction of Bruce Lundvall, who has been in charge ever since. Considering that Blue Note remains a powerful force in the jazz record business at a time when the jazz record business isn’t exactly thriving (even if the label has been cheating a little bit in recent years by signing non-jazz artists like Al Green and Van Morrison), now seems as good a time as any for Blue Note to pay tribute to itself. Read more »
Alaska has of course been much in the news lately. But until recently, none of that news had anything to do with jazz.
That has changed. While the rest of the country was focusing on the state’s maverick governor and criminal-defendant senator, Alaska Airlines made itself a player in the jazz world by virtue of a surprising act of heroism: pledging $50,000, this year and next, to keep the Portland (Oregon) Jazz Festival going. In early September, just a few weeks before the airline stepped in to save the day, the festival had announced that it was “ceasing operations, ending a five-year span of presenting a world-class jazz festival each February in Portland.
Now it’s back to business as usual for the Portland Jazz Festival, which has just announced its 2009 lineup. And next year the festival, to run from Feb. 13-22, will have not just a sponsor (more than one, actually: the event’s new full name is the cumbersome “Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air Portland Jazz Festival Presented by The Oregonian A&E”) but an enticing theme as well — Blue Note Records, which will be celebrating its 70th anniversary.
The good news is that there will be a four-day festival in New York this month devoted to the music of Thelonious Monk. The less than entirely good news is that it’s being presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Lincoln Center’s jazz operation, under the unquestionably ambitious artistic direction of Wynton Marsalis, has been controversial from the beginning. As much praise as it has garnered for raising the music’s profile and treating it with the respect it deserves, it has attracted an equal amount of criticism for hewing to an overly conservative agenda. Still, while Jazz at Lincoln Center’s focus on the old at the expense of the new has been a legitimate source of carping, I have never heard anyone suggest that its devotion to major figures like Monk and Duke Ellington is a mistake. The issue is how that devotion is expressed. Read more »
As if they don’t have enough on their plate already, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will be artists in residence at next year’s Monterey Jazz Festival.
The orchestra will be a featured attraction at the festival in September, but the gig is primarily educational in nature: Members will work with student musicians in clinics and one-on-one sessions at both the Next Generation Festival in April and the Monterey Summer Jazz Camp. Marsalis is of course the marquee name, but according to the festival three other members of the orchestra — saxophonists Sherman Irby and Joe Temperley and trumpeter Sean Jones — will be doing the bulk of the educational work.
The artist-in-residence program is one of the key components of the Monterey Jazz Festival’s educational operation, which has grown exponentially since its modest beginning in 1970. The Festival now invests almost a million dollars a year annually in jazz education through a variety of programs.
Jazz at Lincoln Center held a Thelonius Monk festival over the weekend, and its biggest event was a program of large-ensemble music at Rose Theater, with the 16-piece Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the pianist Marcus Roberts. In the past the organization and its house band have presented and played Monks music up and down. The orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis, has particularly personalized the notion of big-band Monk. Its concerts in the past 15 years have included some of the large-ensemble Monk orchestrations written by Monk and Hall Overton in 1959 and 1963, but also new commissions from its own members, magnifying small-group Monk tunes.
