A Jazz Respite from the Zeitgeist
Once again, I had the chance to attend Cape May’s now semi-annual jazz festival. This one proved smaller than many, and yet it still offered a wide range of high-quality music (can you say ‘Grammy-winning artists’?). It also offered refuge from and restoration amidst a troubled and troubling zeitgeist... and, perhaps appropriate to the times, especially in between the notes.
I offer below three such personally meaningful and restorative events.
Luciane Dom. Brazilian jazz singer. Performing with her band for the first time in the USA. Performing in part through the Performing Arts Global Exchange program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. The world connected through a combination of foundation and government…and music.
Multiple times, she pronounced her appreciation and delight for having the opportunity to come to the US to play… the audience clearly expressed its appreciation of her and her band’s music, and did so often. She ended the show requesting that the photographers take a picture of the group with the crowd…not the usual figure/ground photo!
Yet, above all, I remember the bass player. Muscle shirt well filled out—a substantial man of mixed race. Amidst a set of songs about the black diaspora, love, and human connectivity, he stopped playing to gather himself, to address the residue of his crying. The music continued and, after perhaps a minute, he rejoined it. Enough ‘said'.
John Floridis' interview of Luciane earlier this month for Musician's Spotlight is worth a listen...it includes a sampling of her music.
Brandee Younger Trio. Jazz harpist. Yes, that’s a longstanding ‘thing’. Magnificent music. Plus, Brandee Younger demonstrated how to take in and share recognition. The night before she had played Carnegie Hall. Cool. AND, she had gotten to play Alice Coltrane’s harp, i.e., the harp of one of the early deities of her craft. Even cooler. She concentrated her brief comments about all of that not on playing Carnegie Hall or the recognition involved in the awarding of the opportunity to play Coltrane’s instrument. Instead, she relayed the wonder in placing her fingers on the instrument, the harp that Coltrane had owned and played. Musical tribute to Alice Coltrane—not surprisingly—followed. No braggadocio. No hubris. Just class. Lots of it. Along with celebration of another and of her work. Here's a 23-minute beauty of a sample of her music (with her group) KNKX Studio Session.
Finally, Terence Blanchard. Trumpeter extraordinaire. Seven-time Grammy winner and composer of multiple film scores, including of every Spike Lee movie since 1991. Blanchard paused at one point to introduce his new and as yet unrecorded song entitled “Prism”. He said that we live in a time of prism, a time taken apart, disaggregated, a time split into its components, just as a prism would split light into its components. He opined that we needed a reverse prism; we needed to recombine the components. Hence, the song. Here is Terence and The E Collective performing 'Breathless'.
As with so much of jazz—a special beauty lives in the space between the notes.
See you in Cape May… at the fall festival.