Old and new dreams The Newport Jazz Festival BY JON GARELICK

At 4:30 last Sunday afternoon, the closing day of this year’s JVC Newport Jazz Festival, a strange sound wafted over the sun-baked grounds of Fort Adams State Park — an alto saxophone playing a slow blues.

At one time that sound would have been the hallmark of a major jazz festival. But it’s a sign of how varied jazz has become that what was once the norm is now the fringe. And it’s not that this was by any means a festival watered down by pop — just that jazz wore so many different faces. On this day alone, Cassandra Wilson sang her jazzy deconstructions of folk, rock, and pop; Pat Metheny assayed state-of-the-art guitar-trio jazz leavened by his particular brand of folk; the Detroit Experiment and Me’Shell Ndegéocello grooved with hip-hop; the Bad Plus played piano-trio Nirvana; Stanley Clarke played old-school, very loud jazz-funk fusion; Eddie Palmieri played his revved-up Latin jazz; the Spanish Harlem Orchestra played vintage salsa; Dewey Redman was an old avant-garde dog playing some old and new tricks; and Dave Brubeck was Dave Brubeck.

The whole weekend, in fact, had been like that. From George Benson to no-show India.Arie and even opening-night chanteuse k.d. lang and indie-rockers Smokey & Miho (who have traded their rockisms for straight-faced bossa nova) — everyone honored a legit jazz pedigree. It was one of those events producer George Wein says he’s always looking for, one that delivers both artistic credibility and commercial viability.

The weather, of course, didn’t help with the latter. Metheny can draw a few thousand by himself, but threatening weather makes Newport — and its site on the exposed Narragansett peninsula of Fort Adams — a financial risk for the consumer. How wet do you want to get for Pat? So the 10,000 capacity site drew 5500 on Saturday and 6000 on Sunday — respectable, indeed, but not a blowout. Wein would be the first to tell you: that’s show biz.

Even in the milieu of a high-quality varied program, Bobby Militello’s alto solo on Brubeck’s "Travelin’ Blues" hit with a pleasurable shock. In its pure tones and beautifully articulated double-time runs, it could have held its own anyway. But on Sunday it had the added benefit of being something that no one else was playing — even though, in stylistic terms, it was as old as the day was long. And it got an ovation bigger than that I heard for any soloist that day.

Brubeck, at 82, was the festival’s eldest statesman and the strongest link to the music’s past. He opened with "The Sunny Side of the Street" (a cheery thumbed nose at the overcast skies?), which was full of his patented pummeling staccato chords and a touch of stride. On "Travelin’ Blues," he jacked up the intensity of Militello’s solo with triplet quarter-note exclamations. It looked like being a good set. "Take Five" was on the list for an encore. At a backstage press conference later in the day, when he was asked why he plays the piece every night, he said, "You can tape it every night of my life and find out why I keep playing it."

I would have stayed for Brubeck’s finish, but there were other legends to be heard. The Newport Fest does a good job of alternating its main-stage and second-stage acts, but the fact is, you can’t sit through an entire set of one artist without missing a chunk of somebody else’s, especially as the day progresses and scheduled set times run askew. On Sunday, I wanted to catch Dewey Redman, who was playing opposite Brubeck. Now 72, Dewey has never been as famous as his son Joshua, but among jazz fans he’s more important — Fort Worth–born, he’s in the lineage of tough Texas tenors like Arnett Cobb and Illinois Jacquet, an important voice in Ornette Coleman’s bands of the late ’60s and early ’70s, and even an innovator at incorporating "world music" influence into jazz.

At Newport, he did it all. By the time I hustled over to his side of the Fort, he was in the middle of a beautiful take on the Sammy Cahn ballad standard "I Should Care." His "Walls-Bridges" was Ornette-like, with a helter-skelter head punctuated by dramatic stops, and then a very up-tempo straight-time run. Redman played alto on the tune, and that made his link with fellow Fort Worth native Coleman even more explicit — in the vocal quality of his tone and phrasing, and in the spontaneous irregularity of those phrases’ lengths. For a bit, he vocalized through the horn, another Redman innovation, both comic and directly emotional.

On "Unknown Tongue," he brought out the double-reed Arabian musette he’s been playing for years as a "second" instrument, with its truly exotic, nasal trill. After a short, out-of-tempo a cappella introduction, bassist John Menegon and drummer Matt Wilson joined him in a dancing polyrhythm. Redman got theatric — he broke into a babbling "unknown tongue," put his hands on his hips and looked askance, mugging like a comic tribal chieftain (and he was dressed the part, in his usual skullcap and dashiki shirt), led a call-and-response with the audience. He ended on a barrelhouse tenor-sax blues, getting another call-and-response going, returning to R&B roots.

THE EXPERIENCES of live and recorded music have their differences, but festival going is a whole other ballgame. A more useful analogy would be the difference between live football and football on television: it almost takes a different kind of person to enjoy one or the other. At Newport there are no reserved seats (except for a section of folding chairs for corporate sponsors), so everyone has to stake out his or her terrain on the sloping field in front of the fort. There’s little shelter from the elements, and little to focus your attention on the small figures on the stage except the sound and the insufficient Jumbotrons. Still, I recall falling into a rapture of dreamy attentiveness one sun-drunk afternoon as Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter exchanged phrases on that stage so far away.

Cassandra Wilson was something like that Sunday. She disassembled Hoagy Carmichael’s "Skylark," Dylan’s "Lay Lady Lay," and the Monkees’ "Last Train to Clarksville." She created new melodies and floated them on her rich contralto, made the Dylan more urgently menacing and sexual, made "Clarksville" sound like Robert Johnson’s Clarksdale. She shimmied around the stage as percussionist Jeffrey Haynes played a modified trap set with his hands, Brandon Ross played unamplified acoustic guitars, Lonnie Plaxico kept track of the elusive beat, and Gregoire Maret sailed his chromatic harmonica lines through the humid air.

There was an advantage to playing the Mercedes-Benz Pavilion second stage, since the tented roof with folding chairs for a couple of hundred concentrated sound as well as audience attention. So it’s no surprise that newcomers the Spanish Harlem Orchestra exploded and made hash of venerable Latin hero Eddie Palmieri’s otherwise elegant main-stage set. Here was a 13-piece outfit with three lead male vocalists, a two-trumpets/two-trombones/one-baritone-sax horn section, bass, keyboards, timbales, congas, and bongos. Everything was about rhythm: the montuno call-and-response of the singers (replete with synchronized choreography), the layering of soaring trumpets over riffing trombones, leader Oscar Hernández’s piano chords. And it was all executed with hairpin precision. Their Ropeádope release Un Gran Día en el Barrio only hints at the power this band pack live.

As for Pat Metheny’s Newport debut, with bassist Christian McBride and drummer Antonio Sanchez, for the most part it did not disappoint. The former boy wonder opened with a showy acoustic number, using a custom-made guitar with two sets of criss-crossing strings (it was on view at the MFA "Dangerous Curves" guitar show a couple of seasons ago) that gave him mandolin highs and double-bass lows. But it was the trio interaction that generated the real excitement, McBride and Metheny perfect foils as their morphing rhythmic motives created the illusion of self-generating melodic lines.