Jazz
“He’s someone who appears only once in a hundred years.”—Hermeto Pascoal
“I like singing live; I try to sing well live, I try to prepare myself for the audience, for that room. And I care a great deal about singing live, because I think that’s the experience of jazz. Even if I’m singing Brazilian music.”
One doesn’t come away from a Wayne Shorter Quartet performance merely raving about individual accomplishments: the set on Sunday night never felt like just a compelling sequence of solos.
Peter Pullman deplores (without bathos) the wreckage of Bud Powell’s life and mourns (without tears) the consequent loss of so much masterful music. And his story of Powell’s life is even grimmer than the one we have previously been told.
Ralph Alessi’s compositions are flexible rather than tightly organized, yet their initial statements are strong enough to dominate even the freest group improvisations that follow.
The slow tempos on the whole didn’t hurt the show. People were there to hear Madeleine Peryoux — her voice and delivery, her offbeat arrangements and particular idiosyncratic take on familiar songs.
As the festival season draws to a close, a look back at the 2013 BeanTown Jazz Festival.
Every few years, people ask, “Is Jazz Dead?” Nights like this, with living masters and future stars all paying homage to a dead legend whose music will live forever, refute the pessimism.
Kneebody threw jazz into the stylistic blender and it popped out as something you probably haven’t heard before. The future sounds good.
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