We made an extra effort to get out early on the first night of Jazz Fest 11 and we were in good shape for down front seats at Kilbourn Hall for the bass player Christian McBride but word spread that he was stuck in Newark airport due to wind. You’d think McBride could have made an extra effort to leave a few hours before the show or just driven up here.
Hatch Recital Hall, the newest addition to the Jazz Fest venue list is easily the best sounding room in the line-up. It’s not a room, it’s a performance space and it only holds about two hundred people. It’s like sitting in front of a big speaker but in this case the tweeter is a Steinway Grand and the woofer is a gorgeous sounding stand up bass in the capable hands of Canadians Don Thompson and Neil Swainson. They have played together for thirty years and know over two thousand songs so they were melodic and lyrical as twenty first century musicians can be.
We had seen “Get The Blessing” before at an earlier Jazz Fest and we gave their straight ahead trip hop a second try. Elements of jazz, the two horns, with plenty of effects on top of a clubby rhythm section in the cavernous Christ Church seems like it could work. The drummer and bass player had success with Portishead but here their instruments had a wide dull rumble sound like a rock band down the street rehearsing.
Goran Kafjes Subtropic Arkestra at the Lutheran Church borrowed the the name of Sun Ra’s band. They built their songs around somewhat repetitive keyboard progressions and with seven players they managed to sound like a big band but they didn’t swing like Ra or visit the astral planes. Jonas Kullhammer was in the band which was sort of odd. He was such a dynamo with his own quartet in years past. But still I liked this band quite a bit. It was trumpet player, Goran Kafjes’, birthday and their music was fun like a Bollywood soundtrack.
Ingmar Bergman comes from the Faroe Islands and there is something of that austere quality in Yggdrasil’s delicate sensitive music. Like the early, hippie, new age ensembles Paul Winter Consort or Oregon, they look for inspiration close to the earth. Yggdrasil performed a beautiful nine part piece devoted to the Inuit and Native American tribes of North and South America. With chanting, piano, bass, flutes, violin, drums and an electric guitar player in a Pink Floyd shirt they were quite extraordinary.
I’m keeping track of the Jazz Fest over here.
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