PopWars

The Dave Liebman Quartet was last here for the 2003 version of the Rochester International Jazz Festival. He tore it up then so we prepared ourselves for takeoff last night. We grabbed a table down front at Montage and sat with Rick and Monica. We ordered a Brooklyn Lager (one of the sponsors of the show) and the waitress asked for the cash up front. She explained that she had to buy the beer from the bartender. This club is on its last legs and I suspect they are already out of business. They still had the “STEEL” sign up on the wall from the days when they went metal and the barricade to keep the meatheads from diving on the stage.

The set was exhilarating. Dave is in complete command and he gets there every time. The group has been together for years and they play like a real band. They listen to and work with each other like pros. They did a tune from their new cd that was the slinkiest, low down, film noir track I have ever heard. Dave started it with a little wooden flute and he switched to soprano sax while the bass player strolled through some dark, swinging neighborhoods.

At the end of his set he told he crowd, “OK. You go see the rest of the bands. And you tell me.” Martin Edic had just chided us for darting around. He said, “You can’t just pop in for one or two songs and decide whether you like someone or not”. So we looked at each other and decided to just stay right here for the second set. It was equally good if that is possible. Dave did a song dedicated to an African pop singer who he heard everywhere while traveling to the Sahara for his sixtieth birthday. He played percussion in the intro and then some wildly exotic tenor. You rule Dave!

I’ve some more photos from the Jazz Fest here.

The tabla player, Badal Roy, who was featured in the program as the key player in Dharma Jazz was a no show last night at Max’s. Dan Johnson sat in and did a pretty good job but he was filling some big shoes. The keyboardist, who did most of the talking, said this band is a collective but he acted like it was all his. He did have a better sense of rhythm than the two percussionists.

We hung around Gibbs Street, renamed “Jazz Street” for the week, until Kamakazie Jazz started. We skipped John Scofield at Kilbourn but kept our ears open for reviews from people who had seen the first show. Kathy Palokoff said she had “never seen a band that old playing rock and roll” and in this morning’s paper Jeff Spevak said “With John Scofield the Jazz Festival really felt like jazz”.

We stopped into RoCo where pieces continue to sell in the 6×6 show. There are over a thousand red dots on the wall now. And then we went next store to Christ Church for Yggdrasil who transported us to a Nordic seashore with a beautiful forty five minute piece.

I posted a bunch of photos from the jazz fest on the Refrigerator. You can get to this years batch by clicking on the 2008 Club Pass.

I kept thinking about the feature on Marlene Dumas in the Sunday Magazine Section of the NYTs. There is a major retrospective of her work opening at the LA County Museum next month and that show moves to MOMA in December. I know where I’ll be.

Stephanie McKay at the Rochester International Jazz Festival

We started the night in line with Peter and Nancy for the Bad Plus at Kilbourn Hall. The Bad Plus are the rock stars of jazz, adored by their fans and the individual players seem to each have their own fan base, especially the drummer, David King. The bass player in the middle holds the wildly divergent classically tinged piano player on the left and the raucous angular drummer on the right at bay while tying it all together. But the three of them became a competent back up band for Wendy Lewis when she took the stage to sing beautiful versions of new standards by Nirvana, Pink Floyd, the Bee Gees, Bobby Vinton, U2 and Heart. This was their first gig with her, a preview of their upcoming cd.

We finished the night standing near Peter and Nancy, this time at the newly remodeled High Fidelity (they took the Labatts beer signs down). We thoroughly enjoyed Stephanie McKay, “Soul Sister Number One”. Her sincere, heartfelt songs deserved a real band, not the hot dogs (five string bass, one handed rolls with a goofy smile) she appeared with. She has one cd out in England and another on the way here. She took the stage like Sly Stone and came out in the crowd to dance and invited people back up on stage with her. She is a great entertainer.

On a tech note: A few days ago I was looking for a script that allow me to add rss feeds to a site and have them scroll. Dynamic Drive offered one and they had a live example that was pulling in current tech related feeds. One of the heads caught my eye. It was something about WordPress sites getting hacked. I followed the link and it had a few tips about settings that I was already using so I moved on. But when I checked in on my blog this morning I was alarmed by the fact that my recent posting were missing. I thought maybe it had been hacked so looked for articles but couldn’t find any. I suspected the server so I called the guy who rents the space from the guy who rents the space from the guy who owns the server in Las Vegas. Sure enough it was down yesterday and they installed a new drive and restored the sites with backups that were two days old. I back up my blog but in that space between backups it is worth noting that the only copy of this stuff is online. Unless you are in the habit of coping the entries to a text document before posting. I sometimes do this and so I found one the deleted entries there. I found the other entry in a Google cached version of that page. This was just two days ago and Google had a cached version of an entry that had gone down with an old server hard drive. Welcome to the modern world.

Timo Lassy Band at the Rochester International Jazz Fest

Helsinki must be a swinging city. I know I liked the section of Jim Jarmusch’s “Night On Earth” featuring that city the best. And Helsinki’s Timo Lassy Band at the Lutheran Church for the opening night of Rochester’s Jazz Fest was hot. They play jazz like it was played in America in the fifties and sixties and they manage to make it sound exciting and new. This is the third time we have seen Timo Lassy at the Jazz Fest and each time it was in a slightly different setting. Here’s Lassy in 2003 and 2007. Last night he switched from tenor to baritone for an afro centric, Pharoah Sanders like thing where the drummer played mallets and the percussion player dug a deep groove.

We started the night with the Al Foster Quartet. Al played drums on two of my favorite Miles albums, “Get Up With It” and “On The Corner”. We saw him a few years back at Art Park in Buffalo with Joe Henderson and we stopped in to see Sonny Rollins at the Eastman during the 2005 Jazz Fest to hear him play behind Sonny. He is loose with a master’s touch. Al started one song playing with his hands and liked to play the rim of his floor tom with the side of a stick. The band stayed in check and were the perfect foil for Al who took off at a moments notice but always returned with a soft landing.

We stopped in the Harro to see Ben Riley’s Monk Legacy. Riley played on some of Monk’s best work and still had the goods but the four horn players in the front line were too chart oriented for our tastes. There was a great quote in Frank DeBlase’s interview with Ben Riley where he talked about rehearsals with Monk. “We never rehearsed. If you rehearse you start playing things you know, and you don’t put anything creative in it.” The sound in this room though is problematic at best.

We finished the night in the Big Tent with the Spam All Stars while it poured outside. It was a new tent this year. No leaks and no poles to obstruct our view. A guy with a really short haircut stood behind two turntables and a sound generator of some sort kicking out contemporary bass and drum loops while three horn players and timbale player played along. The horns lines were kind of exotic and worldly. But having just seen two of the best drummers in the world the rhythmn section seemed pretty lame.