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 »

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 »

We exited my apartment in downtown Chicago last night and made our way toward the Barack Obama rally in Grant Park. As Hutchinson Field had long since reached its capacity, my friends and I went to the opposite end of the park, the better part of a mile from where Obama was to give his victory speech (the stage was set up where the main AT&T Stage was at Lollapalooza). After weaving our way through the rapidly expanding mass of Obama supporters (of which there were supposedly more than a million), we spent a few minutes joining the masses in cheering and jeering at the current poll numbers being broadcast on a Jumbotron.  Read more »

What is Randy Newman doing at a jazz festival? Or aren’t questions like that even worth asking these days?

After all, if I were going to be in San Francisco for the 26th annual San Francisco Jazz Festival, I would probably want to see Newman’s Oct. 17 solo concert at Davies Symphony Hall (even if it is pretentiously titled “The New American Songbook,” whatever that means). He is a brilliant songwriter. He is also a singer and pianist with a style unlike anyone else’s. His recently released new album proves that he’s still on top of his game. So what if his music has absolutely nothing to do with jazz?  Read more »

Looking backwards is the default position of all jazz festivals, and Monterey is no exception. But at least the Monterey organizers have displayed some ingenuity in planning the retro side of this year’s event.

That a tribute to John Coltrane is on the schedule might normally be the occasion for not much more than a gigantic yawn, but this one is a little different. It’s actually a tribute to a single Coltrane album, and one of the more unusual entries in the Coltrane discography: his 1963 collaboration with the vocalist Johnny Hartman. It was one of a series of albums Coltrane made in the early sixties weighted toward ballads, mostly as a way to persuade the more timid or conservative listeners that Coltrane, whose music was becoming increasingly adventurous, had not abandoned the jazz mainstream. The album may not have been Coltrane’s finest hour, but it was certainly a career highlight for Hartman, a romantic baritone who spent most of his career well under the radar, and it holds a special place in many listeners’ hearts.  Read more »

His precise role in the worldwide festival operation he helped create may be a little fuzzy these days, but George Wein is determined to remain active — with or without the help of his new employer, Festival Network.

Wein remains an executive of Festival Network, which bought his company, Festival Productions, last year. But he no longer has total control over the Newport Jazz Festival, the JVC New York Jazz Festival, or any of the other properties that were once his. He is, however, free to present music under other organizations’ auspices, and that is what he will be doing, beginning later this year, at Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall’s intimate underground performance space.  Read more »

George Wein’s piano playing was a little raggedy at the beginning of his set Sunday afternoon at the Newport Jazz Festival. But who was going to tell him?

Wein, the man who pretty much invented the concept of the outdoor music festival at Newport in 1954, occupies a curious, not to say precarious, role in the current festival universe. As a recent article in the New York Times explained (or tried to explain; I found the piece poorly written and at times annoyingly unclear), he is no longer the man in charge of the Newport Jazz Festival, or for that matter any of the other events that used to be part of his company, Festival Productions, which he sold last year to a new company, Festival Network. But he still has a role, vague as it may be, and — at least according to the Times — he booked this year’s festival in conjunction with Jason Olaine of Festival Networks.  Read more »

The forecast for Newport on Sunday, August 10, was not altogether promising: scattered thunderstorms, starting in mid-afternoon and continuing into the evening. But the forecast was wrong. The weather was beautiful all day, sunny but not too hot, and not a drop of rain fell until late at night.

It would be foolish to look for any deeper meaning here. But if you want to believe that God is a jazz fan, and that He wanted to make sure this year’s Newport Jazz Festival finished on a positive note, be my guest.

The beauty of the day was not lost on the festival’s headliner, Sonny Rollins, making his first Newport appearance in nobody could remember exactly how many years. Looking out from the Fort Adams State Park stage at the bright sunshine, the puffy clouds, the boats in the harbor and the ecstatic crowd, Sonny announced at one point: “It’s so beautiful out here, ladies and gentlemen, that I don’t know what to do with myself.”

I knew just how he felt.  Read more »

Aretha Franklin rocked as the day’s closing set. 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.  Read more »