I started Monday night with a rough plan to hit three artists: the probing pianist Paul Cornish in Hatch, the grooving guitarist Dave Stryker at the Theater at Innovation Square, and then the outstanding NYC All Stars in Temple Theater. I hit all three, plus three more: the Headhunters in Kodak Hall, Joslyn & The Sweet Compression at The Duke, and the Allan Harris Quartet in Max. I also swung by the free stages, including the Jazz Street Stage for the Eastman School of Music scholarship concert, and the Wegmans Pavilion where I enjoyed some ice cream while Novasonic kept the outdoor festival crowds entertained and dry. It was one of those taste-testing nights where I let the wind (and misty rain) take me in unplanned directions. Because I was running around, I focused more on taking photographs than notes on each performance. Still, I wrote some reviews of the earlier shows yesterday at my Jazz Festival Live: June 22 page, so I won’t recount those. But my final two shows of the night were possibly the highlights of the day, so I’ll share some more detailed thoughts here.
Whether playing a tune that goes a mile (or several)-a-minute or a slow ballad, there’s nothing like getting some hot-shot jazzers together on a stage and letting them rip. The 9:15 p.m. set of the NYC All Stars (an admittedly hokey title for the group) felt as close to being in a NYC jazz club as I’ve experienced here, partially for the dark and brooding atmosphere in the converted church. And it had something to do with the musicians, each of whom has as much personality as they have technical command on their instruments. I walked in right after they began, and all five were firing on all cylinders simultaneously. The cacophony of sound made me smile, feeling I had found my music, the free-wheeling jazz that I grew up enjoying at places like Smalls jazz club in NYC. (For context: I grew up in the greater NYC region and would “miss” my train home from my Saturday conservatory training at Juilliard Pre-College so that I could hang out at Smalls in the West Village until morning. It was $10 and once you were in, you could stay all night. It was the best and cheapest overnight in NYC, as far as I was concerned. Smalls is still there, although the cost and atmosphere changed sometime in the early 2000s due to growing financial pressures.)
My night, however, ended more conventionally. And that’s not a dig on the music, at all. After the All Stars ended at 10:20ish, I popped my head into vocalist and guitarist Allan Harris over at Max at Eastman Place to catch the last 20 minutes of his show. Although Harris is certainly a crooner, singing standards from Frank Sinatra, B.B. King, and Louis Armstrong, it doesn’t seem quite accurate to simply call him a singer. He’s more of an orator, using both spoken word and musical pitch. For his Max show, he juxtaposed spoken poetry and with his musical selections, finding common thematic threads and sonic affinities. Whether signing “It’s a Wonderful World” or reciting Shakespeare, his grainy voice could lend weight and significance to even a mundane financial report. He held the audience in his hand, and took us until nearly 11:30 p.m.
He plays two more sets tonight, Tuesday the 23rd, in Montage Music Hall at 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Still, I’m glad I made it in to hear him last night, since there’s plenty to hear tonight.
Tonight’s Plan:
There are two major shows for me this evening.
1. The Empress, a quartet of women proving that jazz goes beyond gender, who perform in Kilbourn Hall at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. To put it another way, if the NYC All Stars are a testosterone-fueled laboratory for male hot-shot musicians, the Empress is its female counterpart. They’re just as hard-hitting, just as technically competent. And they do it while also being women in the world, mothers, and managing the unfortunate viewpoints that go along with being women in a male-dominated field. The group includes Lauren Sevian, a two-time Grammy Award-winning baritone saxophonist (and who has played the festival in the past, notably with LSAT, the group she formed with alto sax player Alexa Tarantino).
2. It’s my prediction, however, that Hiromi (a club pass show at Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre, in two sets at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.), will be the show of the festival. Hiromi has been on my periphery for a while, but I finally got to hear the jazz piano phenom—whose style is so hard to pin down but whose performances could be described as multi-sensory—up close at the Newport Jazz Festival last summer, and it was *the show* of that festival, which had as good of a lineup as I’ve ever seen at a jazz festival. I won’t go into much more here because you can read the preview of the show I already wrote here. Hiromi is always a fun interview, and this time, she had a lot to say about being a Jedi-in-training next to musicians like Chick Corea. I, of course, argue she’s reached bona fide Jedi status, especially with her latest quartet, Sonicwonder. I can’t wait to know what Rochester thinks, so please share your thoughts if you go.
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