For improvising musicians all over New York, Winter Jazzfest’s return to live stages this month could have brought a touch of near-normal — not to mention over 100 packed performances — in a much-talked-about scene in just over a week. . For audiences, it would have been a moment to dive back into the deep end: hopping around, from clubs to theaters to makeshift venues, hearing how jazz’s creative winds have changed over the past two years.
That was not in the cards. With the emergence of the Omicron variant, the organizers presented the live portion of the festival, and instead staged an impressive series of digital broadcasts pursuing the event’s now 18-year mission: to check in on the myriad state of affairs. of jazz at the top of each calendar year. (There are rumors of a possible summer edition of the festival; only one show has been announced so far, a performance by Pino Palladino and Blake Mills on July 30.)
In the end, more than 30 groups played at digital events spanning nine evenings, including four consecutive ‘marathon shows’ approaching the live festival’s signature event. Rather than blowing away at locations in lower Manhattan, the festival featured 20-minute recordings that artists had captured independently in studios and locations all over New York — and beyond.
The marathon sets revealed a mistaken assumption that live Winter Jazzfests often encourage: that it’s all a reflection of the New York scene. Musicians who would otherwise have traveled to New York to play instead sent in high-quality video of where they were: clarinetist Oran Etkin in São Paulo, pianist Nduduzo Makhathini in Johannesburg, trumpeter Amir ElSaffar on a retreat in Sarasota, Florida.
There were constant technical quirks in the introductions and transitions between sets, but the performances themselves were the high-quality part, as you’d hope. The festival, which booked roughly equal numbers of women and men as bandleaders, also included a three-day series of panels on gender politics and coalition building in jazz, under the title This Is a Movement. (These Zoom conversations were not immediately publicly archived; when they became available, the Jan. 16 conversation on community issues was particularly rewarding.)
Here are five performance highlights you can still stream from the Winter Jazzfest 2022, which concluded this weekend.
Melanie Charles (Virtual Marathon Night 1)
With her playfully serious ‘Make Jazz Trill Again’ slogan, Melanie Charles has set herself a tough task: to treat jazz, a black music genre with a particularly grim history of white exploitation, as interchangeable. So she must first define what the genre means to her – something we know she did, from her love affair with the Betty Carter classic “Jazz (Ain’t Nothing But Soul)”, which she remixed on her latest album. , “Y’ Everyone doesn’t (really) care about black women.” Her choice of henchmen is equally important: her brother, the promising young alto saxophonist Rogerst Charles, the bassist Jonathan Michel, who, like Charles, is a Haitian-American New Yorker, the keyboardist Axel Tosca Lagarde, and the drummer Savannah Harris. Melanie Charles can be tough on quick shifts in dynamics and volume; it feels like an extension of her background as a beatsmith and remixer, and it allowed her to cover a lot of ground in 25 minutes of music (filmed in a HighBreed Music Recording Lounge that was lit and draped in textiles by the designer Laura Fernandez) But the set ended at a moment when the groove almost had time to fully sink in: on Charles’ original “The Dilemma,” where she rises above a groove. the 80s with a lot of soul guilt sings: “We be dimmin’ our light/But we still shine Bright.”
Angel Bat Dawid (Artist-in-Residence)
innocently. Hyper-powered. focused. Change. mercilessly. Angel Bat Dawid, the festival’s artist-in-residence, delivered an epic of performance, two hours of futuristic gospel and in-the-circle catharsis with the Cosmic Mythological Ensemble, a large group she regularly convenes in Chicago. Raw and untempered, it had the ingredients of worship: ritual and repertory and a multitude of voices in collective movement. Returning to such institutions as the Sun Ra Arkestra, Horace Tapscott’s Union of God’s Musicians, and Amiri Baraka’s Spirit House Movers, Dawid strives for an aesthetic of black creative convergence largely left on the ground sometime in the 1970s. She kicked off the set, at the Co-Prosperity Sphere venue (a welcoming home in front of it, though not ideal for recording a performance like this), with a slow, mind-blowing procession, filled with shaken percussion and vocals. What followed was a wide variety of improvised and loosely orchestrated music for more than a dozen musicians; lectures from Baraka, Robert Farris Thompson and 100-year-old reports of Southern lynching news; and spurts of energetic dancing.
Lakecia Benjamin (Virtual Marathon Night 3)
Not every marathon performance—even some successful ones—raised the energy level in the recording studio so much that you could actually feel it in your room. It was difficult without a live audience in the studio. But the alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin had no problems. Leading a speeding quartet that crossed generations – Zaccai Curtis on upright piano, Lonnie Plaxico on bass and EJ Strickland on drums – she played music from her recently released tribute to the sacred jazz family, Alice and John Coltrane, leaning into the blues foundation and the exuberant power of his up-tempo swinger ‘Liberia’, and playing a laggy, hip-hop infused version of ‘Syeeda’s Song Flute’.
Amir ElSaffar (Virtual Marathon Night 4)
On the porch of an artist’s residence on the beach in Sarasota, Amir ElSaffar—a multi-instrumentalist who brings jazz and other experimental methods into conversation with the maqam modes of Arabic music—played the trumpet into an echoing microphone, pointed toward the wave. . He tuned in to the long horizon ahead, letting his array of analog synths build up an increasingly coherent rhythm, and sometimes sang.
Mahogany L. Browne, Samara Joy and Makaya McCraven (closing night)
The final night of the festival began with the words of Mahogany L. Browne, a poet of a musical and triumphant style, who read a poem that “presented a belief system with its water as its minister”, and the body of each being its own mentioned. land of water.” She was followed by Samara Joy, a young singer with a low alto as rich as custard — Sarah Vaughan and Nina Simone come to mind at various times — and a dedication, at least for now, to a classic cool-jazz sound. The evening’s culminating set was the only one without words, with drummer and beatmaker Makaya McCraven and a team of longtime collaborators – Marquis Hill on trumpet, Matt Gold on guitar and Junius Paul on bass – playing grooves from his most recent album. On the LP, “Deciphering the Message,” the band weaves its way into samples drawn from the classic Blue Note Records catalog. At the festival, the group performed their additions without the backbone samples; it was a very different experience from the record – a reminder of what we missed on stage, if not quite a replacement.
