1+1 and more

Highs and lows at the JVC Jazz Festival

by Jon Garelick

The sensory overload is just one of the reasons the annual weekend-long JVC Jazz Festival -- Newport resists generalizations (the corporate-mandated title is another). But just consider the events and ambiance of last Sunday. It began in blazing sun and humidity (no shade at Fort Adams State Park peninsula, kiddies, and bring your own seats) and ended in a thunderstorm downpour. Meanwhile, consider the amenities of the backdrop -- the white-sail-dappled bay, the blue-green span of the Newport Bridge, and, for this weekend, the massive, stately QE II (hosting its own affiliated jazz event) anchored right in the middle of the harbor.

I arrived at this year's sold-out weekend-long festival on Saturday night, in time for this year's "new thing, "acid jazz" (in the persons of Brooklyn Funk Essentials and Liquid Soul), which turned out to be fun, but familiar, funk. Sunday was a more typical Newport jazz experience -- a sun-fried, rain-drenched epic. Don Byron continued to ply his commercial breakthrough, Bug Music (Nonesuch), with his touring septet. The pieces (mostly by Duke Ellington, Raymond Scott, and the John Kirby band) are tightly composed miniatures, all about dynamics and balance. So it was touching to hear them buffeted by the ocean breeze and wayward sound (lead trumpet lines had a tendency to drop out). Still, there they were in all their elegant, swinging humor, and at just the right moment you could hear Byron's woody deep clarinet humming a long line below a busy muted trumpet.

Trumpeter Roy Hargrove's Afro-Cuban project Crisol promised much -- an all-star aggregation including the highly regarded Cuban pianist Jesus "Chucho" Valdez. The line-up was high-spirited, but the music was more mixture than compound. Chunks of Coltrane or Desi Arnaz floated in a percussive soup, and solo features threw off any sense of ensemble unity. Valdes, though, did fire one bravura fantasy that splintered into bright-colored polytonal shards.

Vocalist Rachelle Ferrell is a vocal phenomenon -- vast power and control over a multi-octave range, and a whole bag of vocal tricks. Standards like "Funny Valentine" and "You Don't Know What Love Is" tend to get distorted beyond recognition. But the latter became a long, funny blues and revenge tale. It wasn't until her final piece that vocal drum effects (and sirens and clicks and pizzicato strings) overtook musicality and emotion.

The day would end with pop-jazz golden boy George Benson battling the storm and winning. He played the hits -- "Breezin'," LTD's "Love Ballad," "Give Me the Night," "On Broadway." As expected, he sang along prettily with his plucked octaves, but his voice also took on gospel intensity ("I can play this here guitar!"), and so did his picking, kicked along by the funk from his band (take that, Liquid Soul!). In his set's coda, he cranked the volume and wailed.

Yet the emotional highpoint of the day came from the Herbie Hancock/Wayne Shorter duo, who were working from their new 1 + 1 (Verve). These were the most abstract pieces of the day -- open harmonic structures, free tempos -- delivered at the height of the afternoon's sun-drunk torpor. Hancock would open with some impressionistic piano chords, a classical-style run or two. Shorter would enter with hesitant, piping soprano-sax tones. Gradually, texture and dynamic would build to a climax, then subside to final musings. The pieces were airy, spacious; the delicate melodic lines sustained themselves, however, and Shorter's tone was a wonder -- pliable, full, vocal in its effect. His classic "Footprints" was the most familiar piece of the set, and yet the main theme was reconfigured as a kind of march from Peter and the Wolf. The original tune appeared only glancingly, and so did jazz history in fragments of Sonny Rollins's "St. Thomas," Bud Powell's "Un Poco Loco," and a half dozen others. Did I say epic?