A disparate diet of sounds at Newport
By JON GARELICK | August 15, 2006
MINORITY REPORT: “Let’s spin the wheel on Pavement’s greatest hits,” James Carter said.
|
Gold Sounds were in the middle of a hellacious set of Pavement covers at the JVC-Newport Jazz Festival last Saturday afternoon when a woman who appeared to be in her 70s — blonde, resplendent in flowing white embroidered blouse and matching white pants and sandals — turned to me and said, “This is the sleeper of the day! I was going to get a lemonade and go back to Al Jarreau, but this is happening!”It was that kind of weekend in Newport — a beautiful mess of anomalous sounds and concepts, and clear, dry weather to boot. And yes, in case you haven’t heard, Gold Sounds are a project put together by the stoners at Brown Brothers Recordings to ask the musical question “What’s the most fucked-up jazz tribute project you can think of?” Well, not exactly. But after the release of a homonymous album, I thought I’d probably heard the last of the Gold Sound guys. Yet here at the festival were jazz heavyweights James Carter and Cyrus Chestnut with bassist Vicente Arthur and drummer Ali Jackson (of Wynton Marsalis’s quartet and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra) — as black a group as you could get, playing the whitest of nerdy white indie rock. They took tunes like “Cut Your Hair” and “Blue Hawaiian,” funked them up, twisted them, drop-kicked them into free time, and made jazz even when Jackson was slamming down the hardest of rock backbeats. Pondering their next move between songs, Carter (who returned on Sunday with his organ trio) said sotto voce, “Let’s spin the wheel on Pavement’s greatest hits.” Then Jackson started slapping his tambourine while Carter tongue-slapped his tenor and began squawking the opening notes of “Summer Babe.”
The smorgasbord festival set-up — overlapping shows on three stages — guarantees that you’ll never catch the full arch of a single performance unless you’re willing to miss part or all of another. So it was when I headed for Gold Sounds after 10 minutes of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band at the small Pavilion Stage. I’d heard an amiable “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” — trumpet, bass, banjo, piano, no drummer, though the trap kit was on stage. Later I heard reports that the Preservation crew had raised the roof, got the whole place doing a second line, with even a couple of face-painted ringers leading the proceedings like a mini Social Aid and Pleasure Club. Oh well.
Related:
Skimming the cream, Robert Glasper, In and out, More
- Skimming the cream
Some of my favorite things from among the people, CDs, and performances I wrote about this year.
- Robert Glasper
In a lot of ways, 28-year-old pianist Glasper’s band is right in the pocket of the modern piano-trio tradition.
- In and out
Berklee professor Bill Banfield began his interview with Ornette Coleman at the Berklee Performance Center a week ago Tuesday by recounting the time he told a friend he was going to be visiting Ornette and the friend exclaimed, “You’re going to speak to God! Tell God I said hello!”
- Covers uncovered
The Bad Plus plus a singer
- Wendy gets Bad
Wendy Lewis's association with the Bad Plus goes back to her shared Minneapolis roots with David King and Reid Anderson.
- Review: The Bad Plus's For All I Care
On each of their previous albums, the Bad Plus let it be known they owed as much to classic rock and pop as to prog jazz.
- Marc Ribot
If you know Ribot only through his brilliant sidemanning with Burnett and Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, you don’t really know Ribot.
- Spring fever
As action-packed as the holidays are, they can be a real dead zone when it comes to decent shows.
- Newport Jazz Festival 2009
Jazzy!
- Covering the bottom end - and the bottom line
The biggest news made by the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals the past two weekends was that they happened at all.
- Best in their field
The jazz scene continues to struggle — along with everyone else — through hard times.
- Less
Topics:
Jazz
, Entertainment, Music, John Pizzarelli, More
, Entertainment, Music, John Pizzarelli, Al Jarreau, Ethan Iverson, George Benson, Johnny Hodges, Reid Anderson, Pop and Rock Music, Jazz and Blues, Less