There were times that Pharoah Sanders seemed to connect with the lifeblood of the universe.  That tranquil melody of “The Creator Has a Master Plan” and how Sanders’ sax parted the sea of dissonance on Karma or the rising tide of intensity on “Hum-Allah” and how Lonnie Liston Smith both spurred it on and tamed it by the way he wielded that melody… up to the point when Sanders lit the whole thing on fire for the gigantic climax before the gentle comedown.  It was so full of power, resonating like crazy in all directions, and all of it was as easy to accept as inhaling the air surrounding us all.  The sextet Magic Carpet tapped into Sanders’ source and they didn’t turn it off for the entirety of their Saturday Chicago Jazz Festival performance at the Von Freeman Pavilion.

But while this music resonates with that lifeblood energy of Pharoah Sanders, the way Magic Carpet expresses it is quite different.  A far more relevant comparison would be the geographic influence crossfading of Goran Kajfeš, and how time and distance induce no limitations on the span of his music.  Magic Carpet wavers hypnotically between Indo-jazz, funk, soul jazz, reggae, Afro-jazz and Middle East folk music, and despite the many influences, the group achieves a unison that brings the most tuneful, enchanting music.  But make no mistake, this music grooves hard, and while it’s plenty easy to just kick back and let it wash over you, the impulse to move the feet is gonna be tough to deny.

Fred Jackson Jr. is on alto and soprano saxophones, Timuel “Cream” Jones on guitar, Makaya McCraven on drums, Ryan Mayer with the percussion, Parish Hicks on electric bass and Tracy King with vocals and dance.  For this performance, everybody stood out from the crowd on more than one occasion… individual voices were heard loud and clear even in the seamless group dynamic.  But on a personal note, I was absolutely thrilled with Tracy King’s contributions.  Her vocals came into play only occasionally, but they were heartfelt and full of warmth and energy and sincerity… actually, not unlike Leon Thomas’s on Karma.  But it was her dance that totally set things off.  King dances like so much of this music makes me feel inside.  I know I can’t be the only one who has all these emotions that get bottled up by the joyfulness of all this music we encounter, and to actually see someone physically expressing what I feel inside was a massively cathartic experience.  With some notable exceptions, if a music performance brings on dancers, I just view it as a distraction from the music.  When King briefly left the stage during a song, I felt the air go out of my heart.  Just outstanding.

The electricity in the Von Freeman Pavilion that day was palpable.  It flowed from the stage to the back of the room and the tides carried it right on home.

Here’s some of what went down…

I am certain that this will not be the only time this band sees print on this site.

If they could bottle this show up, it’d get served in bars all across this country.

James Sanders Proyecto Libre put on a powerful show at the Von Freeman Pavilion.  Along with Sanders and his violin were saxophonist Ed Wilkerson, the double bass duo of Harrison Bankhead and Joshua Abrams and the double percussion duo of drummer Avreeayl Ra and Jean-Christophe Leroy, and together they were a band that lived in that moment between light and day.

When Wilkerson’s sax brewed intensely meditative passages, crying out languorously up to the sky, the haunting beauty of Bankhead’s and Abrams’ bass arco settled in over everything.  And when Sanders’ violin was streaking across the scene like lightning unbottled, it was Ra’s sympathetic cymbal crashes that kept things grounded… no different when Ra and Leroy drew some thunder of their own when Sanders’ violin settled into a state of tranquility.  This was a performance where the gentle comedowns of melody behaved as a sunrise quietly dispelling the long night’s madness.

But it wasn’t all moody intensity.  The encore, a Sanders alternate take on Orquesta Aragon‘s classic Cuban tune “Pare Cochero” spurred much of the crowd out of their seats and onto the dance floor, roped into the playful groove and inviting melody.

Still plenty of time and plenty of performances before this year’s Chicago Jazz Fest wrap on Sunday evening, but I already know this is gonna be one of the shows that leaves the biggest imprint on my memory.

Night

Yes, you come to the Chicago Jazz Festival for the music.  But the festival is much more than that.  It has roots in the City of Chicago as much as the City branches out to become a part of the festival, too.  They are interwoven into the same entity, and it’s one reason why I love to head way out to the back of the lawn area and see and hear both at the same time.

It looks like this…

Those musicians you see off in the distance are Orbert Davis and his ensemble.

Davis, this year’s festival artist-in-residence, performed his new commission “Soul Migration,” giving sonic form to the motion of six million African Americans leaving the South behind and, some, making Chicago their new home.  And of everything they carried to a new place, music was one.  Davis’s sprawling work holds hands with Natalie Moore’s “The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago & American Segregation” and Timuel Black’s “Bridges of Memory,” two books that hit the same theme.

This isn’t the first time Davis has managed to encapsulate the sense of a City through the lens of an event.  His 2011 release DuSable to Obama: Chicago’s Black Metropolis is a captivating portrayal of the City through the timeline of its music up to the event of President Obama’s inauguration.  It’s the kind of thing that incites the act of revisiting memories while etching new ones into the music of today.

Davis’s piece didn’t sit still.  It hit any number of sounds, from contemporary fusion to straight-ahead old-school and new, to spoken word and deep into the melting pot of all those forms of expression as one.  There was a moment, when vibraphonist Joel Ross was a voice all alone in the room, tranquil but resonating powerfully, and it was not difficult to imagine a person new to Chicago, behind them a terrible ordeal and ahead an uncertain future, as they sit in their windowsill and look out over the city as the first winter snow begins to fall, lightly, hypnotically, bringing a hush across the neighborhood.  That’s what I’m going to remember of this performance.

Day

With the sun still making its ascent, I strolled into Millennium Park.  This was happening earlier than I’d intended.  But when I realized I had forgotten to stock the hotel room with Irish Cream to go with my morning coffee, off I went into the City to resolve that tragic situation.  God bless Chicago and it’s greasy spoon diners that serve alcohol at all hours.  So, after my morning coffee and some chorizo & eggs, I decided to head up to the park and walk around.  Grant Park is now Millennium Park, and all the open fields and train yards I recall from my teenage years have been replaced with a giant silver bean and climbing walls and lots of beautiful gardens, and so I have lots of exploring to do.  But then I hear the sound of horns and saxophones coming from Pritzker Pavilion, and there is no feeling quite like walking into a park in the morning and being greeted by the sound of lovely harmonies.  I headed on over, no expectations, but thinking I’d sit for a minute before my park adventure began.  It was a large ensemble getting in some practice.  I figure, hell, I’ll get up close to the stage and take a couple photos, maybe tweet ’em out or something.  I zoom in on two of the musicians who are working through their parts, and that’s when I realize, good god, that’s Ron Miles and Curtis Fowlkes I’m looking at.

I’m gonna spare you a very long-winded, long-form piece about my love for the Bill Frisell album Quartet, but both Miles and Fowlkes round out half of the quartet that created that album… so, I’m a little starstruck at this point.  That’s when this lady steps into the frame, obstructing my shot, and I’m thinking, c’mon lady, get out of the way… I’m trying to take a couple photos of two of my favorite musicians.  “Lady,” as it turns out, is Carla Bley, and that’s when I realized I’m watching the Liberation Music Orchestra warm up for the evening’s show.

This is what they sounded like…

I never got to go on my Millennium Park adventure, which is a disappointment pretty easy to ignore when I had the best morning ever listening to the LMO “practice,” which, in a way, made it even better.  Hearing the false starts and the interrupted takes, it made it much easier to live in the moment of the music, to realize that the beautiful music I’m hearing could truly end in the very next second, and that the reliance on a song having a certain, expected duration is something that can’t, in fact, be relied upon and there’s no way to let your guard down.  It was a nice reminder of one way that live music can perform magic in ways that albums never can, that fascination of the unfinished, of the beauty in flaws.

It wasn’t long before I had to head over to the Von Freeman pavilion for the James Saunders Proyecto Libre show.

This Is Jazz Today: A 2016 Chicago Jazz Festival preview, in sound & vision.

Nate Lepine

Jazz is plenty fractured, and the natural inclination of jazz musicians to absorb the music of their environment has, over the course of time, resulted in a vast array of prevalent sounds.  There no longer is (and maybe there never was) a solitary Chicago Sound.  But if you’re looking for an example of music that has a legit claim to being referred to as the Chicago Sound in jazz, right here is what you got.  On his upcoming September 2016 release Quartet:Vortices, Chicago mainstay Nate Lepine offers up music that goes a long way to encapsulating one segment of the Chicago Sound.  The blues comes pouring out, just not quite as smoothly as your old-school jazz quartet would serve it up.  And that’s right in line with a lot of the Chicago scene, which is a strong incubator of modern avant-garde, experimental and free improv.  Melodies with jagged edges and tempos more likely to stomp than bop are common in the Chicago post-bop expressionism.  That familiar old-school sound gets kicked out with a casual fury, an intensity that’s sometimes driven, but sometimes just seems so off-the-cuff as to render harmless any negative impact of aggressiveness.  That’s important, because if you’re gonna light a flame under the blues, damage its soul and you’ve lost the song.  This isn’t the first example of Lepine representing this knowledge.  Same goes with the rest of his quartet, with Nick Mazzarella on alto sax, Clark Sommers on acoustic bass and Quin Kirchner on drums.

The quartet will be performing Saturday, Sept. 3rd at 2pm at the Jazz & Heritage Pavilion.

Here’s a preview track of their upcoming album Quartet:Vortices, releasing in September on Ears & Eyes Records…

Read more about the artist and the upcoming show on the Chicago Jazz Festival site.

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The 38th annual Chicago Jazz Festival is taking place in (and around) Chicago’s Millennium Park, Wednesday August 31st – Sunday September 4th.

Read more about why you should be a part of the audience by visiting the official Chicago Jazz Festival site

Go to Site

*****

This Is Jazz Today: A 2016 Chicago Jazz Festival preview, in sound & vision.

Charles Rumback

One way or the other, I will be at this show.  I will be (likely) badly hungover and dropping f-bombs at the sun for possessing the audacity to shine its light on me, but I will be at the Von Freeman Pavilion on Sunday at the ungodly hour of 1:10pm to see Charles Rumback.

I really can’t tell you what it’s gonna sound like.  Rumback has a fascinating diversity of projects, each with their own distinct personality, often sounding beholden to many genres simultaneously, which, I suppose, is the primary quality to transcend them all.  His most recent release is the 2015 album In the New Year, a recording that has come closest to finding a middle ground between his tendency toward rough edges and an adept craftsmanship of sharp melodies.  This music possesses a warped beauty, where melodies waver and tempos stretch and contract with a curious flow.  The album’s personnel of guitarist Jeff Parker, bass clarinetist Jason Stein, alto saxophonist Caroline Davis and bassist John Tate were birds-of-a-feather for this kind of odds-evens blended imagery.  Here’s a cool video of the album’s opening track…

But here’s where it gets complicated trying to predict what this show will be like.

Rumback has some earlier recordings on the Clean Feed Records label, and they were right at home with the predilection toward dissonance and opaque melodicism.  And then there’s his intoxicating Colorlist, an ambient electronica collaboration with Charles Gorczynski.  There’s also his membership in the avant-rock trio Stirrup, along with cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and bassist Nick Macri.

And then of a more recent vintage is his contribution to the Whirlpool trio, with saxophonist Caroline Davis and guitarist Jeff Swanson, where they dive into the deep end of a melody and don’t bother ever coming up for air.  This, actually, may provide some hints with what’s to come at their 2016 CJF performance, because trumpeter/cornetist Ron Miles will be sitting in on this one.  Miles, who pretty much should be universally known as one of the best modern artists on his instrument, possesses a sound that proves dreams have souls, and whether it’s in collaboration with guitarist Bill Frisell, pianist Myra Melford or with Whirlpool on their 2015 release Dancing on the Inside, Miles locates the heartbeat of that melody and makes it his own, like blood.

Joining Rumback and Ron Miles for this CJF set are saxophonists Greg Ward and Tony Malaby, pianist Jim Baker and bassist John Tate, each of whom are reason enough to show up as if nothing else I’ve said thus far has floated your boat.

Ultimately, what it all boils down to is here’s an outstanding musician who exemplifies the boundless creativity one can express if they just open themselves up to all possibilities and influences and crosscurrents of ideas, whether their own or inspired by their collaborators.

This show takes place on Sunday, September 4th at 1:10pm at the Von Freeman Pavilion.

Read more about the artist and the upcoming show on the Chicago Jazz Festival site.

*****

The 38th annual Chicago Jazz Festival is taking place in (and around) Chicago’s Millennium Park, Wednesday August 31st – Sunday September 4th.

Read more about why you should be a part of the audience by visiting the official Chicago Jazz Festival site

Go to Site

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