Souljazz Orchestra - this was a free concert, announced at the last minute along with a couple of others, to kick off jazz fest. I saw the Souljazz Orchestra in the fall along with a brass band from Chicago. They're a local band, and are quite good. The group is comprised of 6 members - keyboard, drums, 3 saxes (alto, tenor, bari), and a girl who occasionally sings and mostly plays auxiliary percussion. They play lots of solid funk and latin grooves, but their songs are often intricately arranged as well. Solos are probably the group's weakness - not to say they aren't great at it, they just don't exactly compare with the likes of Pat Metheny and Gary Burton (postscript: this is probably a confusing reference, but it makes sense if you read these concert reviews out of order. I'll leave it up to you to figure out what order I wrote them in. Good luck, I don't even remember.) Pretty excellent for a free concert though.
SMV - Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller and Victor Wooten
If you're a bass player you're salivating right now. These are three of the best electric bass players in the world, playing a concert together???! Craziness. Here's the deal: they formed a group and recorded an album a couple years back, and evidently spent a good deal of time arranging their songs for three electric basses (along with a drummer and keyboardist). It sounded weird when I first heard about it, but they really did a great job with the arrangements, and it ended up being one of the best concerts of festival. Those three guys are all masters, so as you can probably guess most of their time was spent trying to one-up each other on unbelievable solos. There's nothing like it.
One of the cool things they did was they each did a feature piece. Victor Wooten played the most amazing electric bass solo piece I've ever heard. Later, Marcus Miller played a song on bass clarinet which actually wasn't that great. Finally, Stanley Clarke did this piece on stand-up bass that I can't even begin to describe - it had a bunch of different sections, and at one point became a slow, dirty blues that was amazing.
If this group ever comes anywhere near you, I'd highly recommend it. I wish I could describe it in better detail, but this is one of the ones I'm writing several months later, and plus, it was indescribable to begin with.
Gary Burton Quartet Revisited with Pat Metheny - the concert I was most excited about in the whole festival, and the primary impetus for buying the student pass. In addition to the two musicians mentioned in the concert title, virtuoso Antonio Sanchez was on drums and old dude Steve Swallow played bass.
I was so excited for this concert mostly because Pat Metheny is one of my favourite guitarists ever, and I've never seen him live. Furthermore, this is the perfect setting for Pat Metheny - I'm not a huge fan of his solo stuff, but as a featured musician in someone else's group, he's just an amazing guitarist.
It was a great concert, but it didn't start well. I was biking down shortly before the concert, and carrying an umbrella in anticipation of the forecasted rain, when I decided to swing my umbrella around like I was sword fighting or something. This, of course, ended up with me getting the umbrella caught in the spokes and flying over the handlebars onto the cement bike path. I was pretty scraped up, but the concert was starting soon, so I didn't have time to worry about that. By the time I found the friend I was meeting at the concert it was pouring rain, so I got to huddle up against the fence while an absolute torrent blasted the many open wounds all over my body.
At first it was pretty uncomfortable, especially since the music wasn't as revelatory as I was expecting from a group of this caliber. At some point, though, everything changed - the rain let up, and the quartet found their groove. Gary Burton is a pioneer of jazz vibraphone, one of the best of all time, and he was on his game. Pat Metheny did his thing. Antonio Sanchez is one of the best drummers alive. Steve Swallow was the weak link, but he looked like he was about 85, so I couldn't really blame him.
After a few standard tunes, Pat Metheny busted out the distortion and reverb and played an amazing solo that was like 8 minutes long. After that, he grabbed his famous 42 string guitar and played a crazy solo piece, followed by a really cool acoustic guitar and vibes cover of Summertime, and then one more guitar-vibes duet with another, very different, acoustic guitar. (on the evening, I think he played like 7 different guitars.)
After this 3 song interlude, Sanchez and Swallow (that sounds dirty) returned and they played a couple songs, finishing with a latin tune that was one of their best of the night. It was still raining, but the crowd was raucous, and if my memory serves me there were 2 encores. Just a fantastic concert.
Michael Kaeshammer - Michael Kaeshammer was part of the free Canada Day line-up, so I stopped by to check it out. I didn't know much about him, but had heard his name here and there. Man, he is incredible. He plays piano and sings, accompanied by bass and drums, but it's more than your standard piano-trio-with-vocals. He really puts on a show, getting the crowd into it, dancing around his piano (he did one song where he literally danced around his piano, very slowly, drumming on various parts to the beat until finally getting back around and playing again). A great performer.
The Wayne Shorter Quartet - Wayne Shorter is a legend. He played with Miles Davis, he co-founded Weather Report, he played with Joni Mitchell, his name is just all over jazz history. But he's gone in some interesting directions of late, and this wasn't my favourite concert. The whole concert was one song, about an hour long, which I may point out is longer than any piece of music I'm aware of, including classical music (symphonies are often longer, but they're broken up into movements, the longest of which I'm aware of is about half an hour). There were great musicians in his quartet, notably Brian Blade on drums, and sometimes the jam session coalesced into something cool, but these moments were few and far between.
The Worst Pop Band Ever - I came out of Wayne Shorter unsatisfied, so I wanted to get some more music in. I didn't know this group, but there was always a late night concert at the National Arts Centre after the outdoor shows had wrapped up for the evening, so I decided to check it out.
These guys are a jazz combo out of Toronto, and they were dece. The coolest thing was they had a guy playing turntables, something I've never seen in jazz before, but it worked really well. Other than that they were a totally normal jazz combo, with a rhythm section plus sax. They played mostly (all?) original material, some of which was pretty cool. It was fairly apparent why they were playing a small, late night show as opposed to a big outdoor concert, but it was fine. Also worth pointing out - the drummer, apparently the group's spokesperson, seemed really lame at first, but he told a couple of really funny stories which caught me by surprise after my initial impression.
The Bad Plus - one of the most innovative groups currently working in jazz. I don't even really know how to describe their music, but I'll give it a shot. I suppose I should first mention that they're a trio (piano, bass, drums). First of all, their songs are extremely well-arranged, and almost never follow the standard jazz model of melody-solos-melody. I mean, there are melodies, and there are solos, but it all seems to flow so well - there are lots of sections that can't really be considered melody, but the band is still doing something together. Notably, in one of their last songs, there was a section in which the three of them just played shots together in some sort of seemingly random pattern. But it honestly went on for like 3 minutes. It was insane. There had to be a pattern, because it would be near-impossible to memorize 3 minutes of a random pattern of notes. But they never messed it up.
They also have an interesting repertoire. I didn't know a lot of it, but it was about half-original (all originals written by the bass player), and half covers. Some of the originals were really cool, and their choice of covers was great also - they played a song by Stravinsky (it's extremely rare for jazz groups to cover classical music) and they also played Tom Sawyer by Rush, which the crowd absolutely loved.
I was standing in the standing room area, off to one side but pretty close to the stage. About midway through, some guy screamed "you guys fucking rock!" in between songs while pianist Ethan Iverson was introducing the music. Iverson, an extremely awkward emcee (the drummer and bassist both looked way more personable), didn't know what to do with it, so they just got back to playing, which was a good decision. Those guys did fucking rock, and it was probably my favourite concert of the festival.
Al Di Meola and the New World Sinfonia - I guess Al Di Meola is pretty famous, but I didn't know a lot about him beforehand - but that's the great thing about having an unlimited pass. So he played the later show the same night the Bad Plus played - they had 2 evening shows at Confederation Park each night, with the later one being the more high profile.
Anyway, Al Di Meola is an incredible guitarist, and he had a really cool band with him (the New World Sinfonia - 6 or 7 guys who played all kinds of cool stuff, including various percussion instruments, guitar, accordion), but something about it just didn't work. The songs didn't really seem like songs - I could rarely pick out a discernible melody. It seemed like things were arranged well, and Al often did really cool duets with other musicians, but it just wasn't as impressive as it should have been, or something.
One thing Al had going for him was stage presence. He was probably the best crowd conversationalist I encountered at the festival. He even had some good retorts up his sleeve for you guys fucking rock guy.
Brian Blade Fellowship Band
Another highlight of the festival (there weren't many lowlights). Brian Blade is a middle-aged drummer who plays with my favourite jazz combo of all-time (the Joshua Redman Elastic Band), and previously played in this festival with Wayne Shorter, but he also has his own band, and they were the closing act of the festival. The band included piano, bass, drums, and a couple of sax players.
Their repertoire was interesting in a similar way to The Bad Plus; it just didn't sound like the standard model of jazz. It was maybe a little more orchestral? This is another one of the 2-months-later reviews, so it's hard to say, but they seem like one of those groups that's taking jazz in new directions. Or at least directions that are new to me.
But the best part of this band is watching Brian Blade. He is by far the most energetic drummer I've ever seen; he's pretty much jumping up and down as he plays, and several times he was so into it the hi-hat was rocking precariously, and though it never fell, it was pretty darn close.
No comments:
Post a Comment