# Live review: New York Winter Jazzfest 2019: A growing event celebrates its 15th anniversary with nine days of diverse offerings: Photos, Video
- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2019/02/19/live-review-new-york-winter-jazzfest-2019-a-growing-event-celebrates-its-15th-anniversary-with-nine-days-of-diverse-offerings-photos-video/
- Published: 2019-02-19T20:57:11+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU
**The 15th annual Winter Jazzfest in New York opened on Friday, Jan. 4 at Le Poisson
Rouge with “Thing Called Life: Prince Reimagined,” a concert by the festival’s artist-
in-residence Meshell Ndegeocello. **
It was a risky move, for it recalled the bad old days when the Kool Jazz Festival
toured the nation with such headliners as Gladys Knight, War, and Roberta Flack—
fine artists but not true jazz acts. Much like George Gershwin and Frank Sinatra,
Prince and Ndegeocello aren’t true jazz acts either, but they have real connections
to our music—both as absorbers and influencers—and this kickoff show successfully
opened a window on the back-and-forth borrowing between the two spheres.
Ndegeocello was a smart choice to illustrate this dynamic. The Washington-raised,
Brooklyn-based R&B singer is a virtuoso bassist and an open-minded arranger willing
to accommodate improvisation and substitute chords—much like Prince, whose 1978
debut album inspired her to become a musician. And her opening-night concert (despite
equipment problems, under-rehearsed numbers, and overly long dance mixes) illustrated
a crucial aspect of the porous boundary between pop music and jazz: It’s not enough
to embrace a non-jazz genre; you have to embrace the right artists within that genre.
If you’re a jazz musician exploring R&B, it makes a big difference whether you’re
borrowing from Prince rather than, say, Cameo. Or, in rock music, Radiohead rather
than Rush. Or, in country music, Rodney Crowell rather than Garth Brooks. When Ndegeocello
sang, “They won’t say that you’re naive if you play what you believe,” on Prince’s“
All the Critics Love U in New York,” her band’s fast, hard attack, bristling with
keyboards and guitars flying off in tangents, made it clear that jazz musicians
can glean a lot more from a maverick (in any genre) than they ever could from an
upholder of the stylistic status quo.
Winter Jazzfest keeps growing. As recently as 2017, it was a six-day affair, but
last year and this year it expanded to nine days. The event’s centerpiece, the “
marathon” for which a wristband gets you access to hourly shows in multiple venues,
expanded this year from two nights to three: the usual two-night marathon plus a
smaller one-night “half-marathon.” The single-ticket concerts grew from seven to
eight.
One of those non-marathon events, on Monday the 7th at Le Poisson Rouge, showcased
three of today’s top fusion bands: Terri Lyne Carrington & Social Science, Terence
Blanchard & the E-Collective, and the Bad Plus. The first two bands owe an obvious
debt to Prince, but they’ve reinvested that loan to yield tremendous dividends in
terms of inventive writing and soloing. Each band boasted an electric guitarist
and an electric keyboardist (Carrington’s Matthew Stevens and Aaron Parks, Blanchard’s
Charles Altura and Fabian Almazan) who knew how to translate the high-wattage textures
of progressive R&B into true jazz solos.
The new version of the Bad Plus substitutes the R&B-savvy Orrin Evans for the classical/
jazz-anchored Ethan Iverson on keyboard. It’s possible to admire both versions of
the band, as this writer does, while acknowledging the differences. The tension
between Iverson and the former prog-rock rhythm section of Reid Anderson and Dave
King created a delicious frisson; Evans is more sympathetic to the pop borrowings,
but he adds some gospel funk to the mix and nudges his bandmates away from Rush
and toward Radiohead.
Another fusion keyboard trio, Medeski, Martin & Wood, headlined the only festival
show to take place outside Manhattan. On Wednesday night at Brooklyn Steel, the
threesome teamed up with the avant-classical ensemble Alarm Will Sound. The two
groups played separately and together, and the latter, reprising the collaborations
from their recent album _Omnisphere_, proved exhilarating. Unlike most art musicians
crossing into jazz, the five reeds, five strings, three brass, three percussionists,
and one pianist of AWS sound comfortable improvising and making harsh sounds. And
MMW, rooted as they are in Booker T. & the M.G.’s, know how to use pop hooks, rock
riffs, and blues vamps as building blocks in extended jazz/art-music pieces.
Ndegeocello was also the public face of the festival’s greater commitment to gender
parity. This yielded musical as well as social benefits. Perhaps the highlight of
the entire week were the two sets by drummer Allison Miller and pianist Carmen Staaf
at Subculture on the second Saturday. The duo performed as half of Jenny Scheinman&
Allison Miller’s Parlour Game with ex-Crowell violinist Scheinman and bassist Tony
Scherr, then came back later as two-fifths of Allison Miller & Carmen Staaf’s Science
Fair with trumpeter Jason Palmer, tenor saxophonist Dayna Stephens, and bassist
Matt Penman.
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**Allison Miller at the 2019 Winter Jazzfest in New York (photo: John Rogers)**
Miller’s tendency to choke up on her sticks allows her to focus her sound by substituting
rim and cowbell shots for splashy cymbals and quickly darting combinations for repeating
thumps. Staaf was a revelation with her muscular bass-clef parts and attractive
treble-clef phrases. Sometimes her hands roamed independently and sometimes they
came together to create chords that sounded like majestic 10-fingered voicings moving
across the keys. Together, the two women proved both propulsive and highly personal.
Like Staaf, Melissa Aldana—who played the half-marathon on the festival’s first
Saturday at Subculture—demonstrated a knack for shaping a solo so it was more than
a sprint through the changes. Leaning forward on the balls of her black-stockinged
feet, the Chilean tenor saxophonist strung notes together like words in a sentence,
expressing something more than mere athleticism, more than mere cleverness, more
confiding and consoling.
Ndegeocello led four different bands with four different themes on four different
nights at the fest. If the Prince evening and the show devoted to new songs inspired
by James Baldwin proved a mix of thrilling highs and patience-trying lows, Ndegeocello
was at her jazziest on the second Friday’s “Music from Brooklyn” event at the Bowery
Ballroom. Supplementing her own band with cornetist Graham Haynes and guitarist
Jeff Parker, she performed jazz rearrangements of songs by such Brooklynites as
OBD, Barbra Streisand, and Neil Diamond that were liberated by an elastic sense
of time and inspired solos.
Best of all, though, was Thursday’s show at Nublu, where Ndegeocello boiled her
band down to a quartet and explored her past recordings. This was her least jazzy,
most vocal-dominated outing, but it confirmed what a brilliant singer and songwriter
she is. Jazz artists would be smart to borrow from her catalogue as much as they
do from Prince or Stevie Wonder.
**Roy Hargrove Remembered**
**Roberta Gambarini at the Roy Hargrove Musical Celebration, Jan. 8, 2019 (photo:
Alan Nahigian)**
On the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 8, Roberta Gambarini stood on the Rose Theatre stage
in Jazz at Lincoln Center, backed by a “Young Lion” combo led by pianist Cyrus Chestnut,
and applied her huge soprano to Benny Golson’s “I Remember Clifford,” with a significant
lyric change. “I know he’ll never be forgotten,” she sang. “He was a king uncrowned.
I know I’ll always remember … _Hargrove_.”
It was just one highlight of a nearly five-hour tribute concert, “Celebrating the
Life and Work of Roy Hargrove,” the trumpeter who died much too young two months
earlier at age 49. Unlike most such memorials for musicians, this one was short
on talk and long on music. After a New Orleans second-line funeral parade snaked
through the audience, emcee Christian McBride gave a short eulogy for his late friend.
From then on, it was one band after another, most of them playing three or four
songs associated with the Houston trumpeter.
There were bandmates like McBride, Jon Batiste, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Marc Cary,
Antonio Hart, and Gerald Clayton. There were mentors such as Jon Faddis, Wynton
Marsalis, and Gary Bartz. There was Dallas high-school classmate Norah Jones. There
was the Roy Hargrove Big Band, the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band, and the Grammy-
winning Afro-Cuban band Crisol. There were seven different acoustic combos, as well
as the electrified RH Factor.
Not strictly a Winter Jazzfest event (though the festival suspended all Tuesday-
night activities in its honor), the concert took place immediately after the second
annual Jazz Congress, held at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Monday and Tuesday, Jan.
7-8. With daytime panel discussions, a trade show, an amazing Art Blakey oral-history
session commemorating his 100th birthday and evening concerts, this parliamentary
session—co-sponsored by this magazine and Jazz at Lincoln Center—was far more successful
than its stalemated counterpart in Washington.
**After please see on the website: https://jazztimes.com/**
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