Category: Rochester

Here’s a little clip of the Respect Sextet playing “Time To Say Goodbye” at the 2006 Rochester International Jazz Festival. The clip runs about 2 minutes. Enjoy!

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Once again, it’s over. From the look of it, the 2006 Rochester International Jazz Festival has been a roaring success. We’ll have to wait for the facts until the annual post-festival press conference, but here are a few thoughts as we close out the year.

1. It was a great decision to close Jazz Street (Gibbs St.) for the whole festival. The East End felt like a party for the whole nine days, and that was fantastic. Toward the middle of the festival, as the weather improved, Jazz Street was packed every night with folks watching the free student shows, and the free shows by the pros, too. This is a what a festival atmosphere is supposed to feel like. My prediction? In another five years, we’ll see additional street closures — maybe even free East Ave shows every night of the festival.

2. Kudos to John Nugent for the diversity of the acts. This year’s festival had a great group of acts from overseas, plus a fair amount of adventurous music for those of us who like hanging out on the ragged edge. I’d like to see a venue devoted to “out” music in future fests.

3. Rochester’s jazz fans are a pretty classy bunch. With a few exceptions, most of the folks in most of the venues were polite and attentive, because they were there to hear the music. The Montage is probably the biggest offender in the loud crowd category, and Max and the tent had those tendencies, too, but by and large people were cool.

4. We have a wealth of student talent in the Rochester area. Alen Tirre and Bill Tiberio booked a great collection of student ensembles for the early sets at the Jazz Street Stage. That was great to see, and it’s always a cause for celebration to see young players diggin’ the music. I was particularly impressed by a young woman who played trombone from West Irondequoit High School.

5. It’s time to start booking acts in other venues at 8 p.m. For the first five years, the producers haven’t booked acts at the same start time as the Eastman shows. It’s probably time for that to stop. The festival is drawing a large enough crowd these days that there are enough people to buy Eastman tickets AND fill the club venues. Otherwise, there’s not much to do at 8 p.m. This year, by the time the 8:30 shows started, you really needed to be in line for a 10 p.m. show at one of the clubs. Which leads me to…

6. We need more venues. Club Passes were sold out on Day 1. Just about every show in the clubs had a 60-90 minute wait, and many people couldn’t get into ANY show during a particular time slot. There are additional venues downtown, and some just out of walking distance that an EZ-Rider-style shuttle could take people to. It’s time for an expansion! We’ll end on an up note:

7. The Bop Shop was back — yay! Two years ago, Tom Kohn and the boys set up shop at East and Jazz Street. This year, they had a tent on Jazz Street. It makes such a difference to have access to the records right there at the festival. I’d like to see the official autograph sessions return, too.

All in all, a brilliant festival, brimming with great music and good times for every jazzhead — and lover of good music — in the region. See you next year!

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It’s always bittersweet as the festival winds down to the end. There are still great acts to see, but you know that in a few days Rochester will turn back into a pumpkin, and we’ll have to wait a year to fit into the glass slipper again.

Tonight in Kilbourn Hall, Sweden’s E.S.T. (the Esbjorn Svensson Trio) worked hard to push back the final moment and keep the festival energized. They succeeded, functioning as a three-man instrument to turn groove into gold and complex harmonic and melodic structures into the anthems that have sold more than 100,000 copies of their latest record. And before you read that number and say, “Wait a minute, doesn’t Britney sell millions of records?” remember that a smash jazz album tends to sell around 10,000 copies. That’s a big hit. So 100,000 is an insane number in the jazz world.

E.S.T. is Esbjorn Svensson on piano, Dan Berglund on bass, and Magnus Ostrom on drums. The band is touring the U.S. and Canada in support of their new CD, Viaticum. Tonight was the first show of the tour. The set opened with “Eighty-eight Days in My Veins” from the new album. Svensson is a wonder, playing left-hand bass lines that many pianists couldn’t play with their right hands, let alone solo over. He and Berglund were locked in at the low end, with Ostrom driving the group forward and adding very musical shadings with cymbals, bells and effects. In fact, the group used its effects skillfully, creating new textures and layers rather than using them to cover up poor or unimaginative playing. “Viaticum” featured a rivulet of rhythmic playing on the bass, but the rivulet quickly widened into a stream of of tubular industrial sounds from the upright bass and an arco solo that sounded like Ravi Shankar going through a Cuisinart. At one point, Svensson reached into the piano with what looked like an overturned shot glass, using it to bend pitches on the strings of the piano. The woman in front of me leaned far forward in her seat as if she were in the crowd at a magic show, trying to see behind the illusion.

Later in the set, Ostrom took a drum solo that was processed through some ENIAC-era effects, the bloops and bleeps blending in with the toms and cymbals. He played the solo with brushes, which added a wonderful texture and sounded great through the effects unit, as did his yelping onto the snare head. And no, that isn’t a type-o. This is a good time to mention that the band came with its own sound engineer, which probably explains why it sounded so good in the tricky Kilbourn Hall.

The highest compliment I can pay is that when I tried to think of whom to compare EST to, I couldn’t come up with anyone. This highly original and entertaining trio is huge in Europe, and promises to have a similar effect here on this continent.

Soulive held court at the East Ave Stage, and thousands of people came out to enjoy the show. Unfortunately, the 9 p.m. start time meant that you could either watch Soulive or line up for a 10 p.m. club set. Maybe next year the festival can finally free itself from its five-year policy of not booking bands at the same start time as the Eastman Theatre shows at 8 p.m. For folks who don’t attend those shows, that means that you usually can only see a club set at 6 and 10, rather than also seeing a club set (or major outdoor act) at 8 p.m.

For me, there was no question about my destination: Asylum Street. No, that’s not an address in Rochester, it’s the home of the Spankers. The Asylum Street Spankers are a reviewing nightmare. The music is just about uncategorizable, many of the lyrics are unprintable, and a Spankers show is more or less indescribable. So take the next several sentences with a grain of salt.

Tonight, the Spankers were a six-piece band. At various times, the members played washboard, fiddle, guitar, ukilele, manolin, percussion, harmonica, upright bass, voice, and beer bottle. Everybody sings, everybody tells jokes, and everybody contributes to the hillbilly-bluegrass-improv-comedy-country-blues-fill-in-your-own-adjectiveness of the experience. Maybe it’s easiest to just give you a few choice concepts, words and phrases from some of tonight’s selections. WARNING: NOT SUITABLE FOR UNENLIGHTENED CHILDREN OR PARENTS!

• “Fellatio. Cunnilingus. Pedaresty. Daddy, why do these words sound so nasty?”
• “Winning The War On Drugs” — sung by Wammo (!) as he chugged a beer
• “You Only Love Me For My Lunch Box”
• “If you love me, you’ll sleep on the wet spot / Buy my tampons using your foodstamps / take out the garbage and clean out the cat box / If you love me, the wet spot is yours”
• A brief interlude of musical saw
• A hilarious tune about bestiality titled “I Want To F*** You Like An Animal” (“written for my grandma,” said Sick (!!), who sang the tune)
• A hick-hop tune “about when cousins marry” combining country murder ballads and gangsta rap
• The Star Wars Cantina Theme

Get the idea? Run, don’t walk, to the next Spankers show. They’ve been in Rochester before, and I’m sure they’ll be back. (Kudos to Tom Kohn from The Bop Shop for making it happen!)

A quick non-RIJF review: I stopped by the Bug Jar after the Spankers show and caught Filthy Funk and a bunch of hip hop MCs and singers gettiin’ it on for about 90 minutes. Hassan dropped the knowledge on the mic, and even saxman Jimmy Highsmith made a guest appearance. Where my funk at?

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Rochester was filled with world-class musicians tonight, but the night belonged to one man named Wayne.

Tom Harrell kicked off the evening in Kilbourn Hall with a set of mostly original compositions. Harrell’s flugelhorn work was stunning throughout the evening as he dipped into the stream of chords and rhythms sprung from the hands of pianist Danny Grissett, bassist Ugonna Okegwo and drummer Rodney Green. For most of the set, it was the contemplative Harrell on stage, navigating circular melodies and intricate chord progressions. At the end of the set, though, traces of the old fire emerged, as Harrell — on trumpet this time — ripped through a masterful solo on “Caravan.” The crowd loved him, whistling and shouting and calling for multiple encores.

The Eastman Theatre was the center of the jazz universe tonight, as saxophonist Wayne Shorter and his quartet held court. Shorter brought his working band for the gig — pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade. This is the band that backed Shorter on his three most recent albums: Footprints Live, Alegria and Beyond The Sound Barrier. Their telepathic communication was evident on stage, as was their sheer pleasure at being together. In recent months, Shorter has been ill, and several of his concerts have been glorified trio shows. Tonight, though, Wayne was in good form, particularly when playing the soprano saxophone. His probing lines cut through the complex interplay of the rhythm section, driving the band to greater heights.

The quartet opened the show with the long and meditative “She Moves Through The Fair” from Alegria. Shorter stuck to the tenor on this tune, and both his sound and approach were often tentative. On the second tune, though, Shorter gained command of the stage, soprano saxophone soaring as Brian Blade rocked — I said ROCKED — so hard that his drum stool fell over. The third tune opened with a lovely duet between Blade on bells and Patitucci on arco bass. The intensity heightened with another masterful soprano sax solo, and this time Blade launched a drumstick across the stage and onto the floor in the orchestra pit where the media sits. My good friend and fellow media guy paused for one beat, then leapt out of his seat to grab the stick as a souvenir. “Hey man,” he said, “it’s like a foul ball.” I waited in vain for Shorter to drop a saxophone into the orchestra pit. Alas, I went home empty-handed. The obligatory “spontaneous” encore featured more soprano and tenor, and ended the evening on a high note.

For the final set of the evening, a packed-to-the-rafters Montage hosted trumpeter Terrell Stafford and his B-3 band, featuring organist Pat Bianchi and drummer Chris Somebody. OK, his last name wasn’t Somebody, but the Montage crowd was so loud — mostly in the bar, not in the music room — that it was impossible to understand about 80% of what Stafford was saying. He noted this problem from the stage, and played two very soft numbers in an attempt to quiet the conversations. Despite the annoyances from the crowd, the set was nicely swinging, with the band putting several jazz thoroughbreds through their paces, including “Skylark,” “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” and “I Don’t Wanna Be Kissed (By Anyone But You).” Particularly moving were the two ballads: “Dear Rudy,” a tribute written by Stafford for his late grandmother, and the even quieter “Nearness of You,” both played on silky flugelhorn.

(UPDATE: It turns out the drummer’s name was Chris Beck. Thanks to the Woodstock Road desk for the tip.)

For complete information, including audio files, concert photos and more, visit rochesterjazz.com.

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