These were some musical highlights from the three stages on the promontory of Fort Adams State Park in Newport, a historic town about four hours by car or train from New York City, where 6,800 people on Saturday, Aug. 4, and 4,600 on Sunday, Aug. 5, roamed about in the sun’s heat and bay’s breeze. From 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. on those days, the most pressing concern for those of us in attendance might have been how to conquer the semi-simultaneous schedule of jazz-connoisseur favorites, whether to buy a lobster roll, and where to sit for a moment on the grass—on a blanket, in a tent’s shade or a rented lawn chair.

The connoisseur behind it all is George Wein. He didn’t invent the pleasure of crowds gathering for leisurely outdoor entertainment—that must be ancient, giving rise to ritual—but he established a model presentation, spread now throughout America and the world. At 86, Wein’s no old fogy. He’s frequently in Manhattan clubs, scouting talent with Dan Melnick, half his age, who has become the Newport fest’s artistic director. Wein was everywhere at Fort Adams, wearing a jaunty cap, zipping from stage to stage in his “Wein Machine” golf cart.

Wein and Melnick prefer dependable mainstream progressives, which in jazz means few avant-gardists but yet surprises are expected and welcome. For instance: Jason Moran played a hushed version of “Body and Soul” on piano then amplified from his iPod singer Eddie Jefferson’s 1952 recording, over which he and drummer Nasheet Waits added soft touches. Moran showed up later for a free exchange with drummer DeJohnette. Listening to each other, they created drama and found resolution, with no pre-plan at all.

When the music was good—most of the time—it was very good. DeJohnette is his generation’s prevailing rhythm-maker; his stick-work explodes in phrases like a boxer’s punch combinations, so that swing and groove merge into sheer propulsion. And his group with alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, who employs sonic inflections from Indian classical music; microtonally attuned guitarist David Fiuczynski; electric bassist Jerome Harris, and keyboardist George Colligan has more interesting activity in their pauses, as what they’ve done resounds, than other ensembles have in their climaxes.

Alto saxophonist Steve Wilson also delved into microtonal note-bending in his solo on Gil Evans’ “Punjab,” a work dealing with South Asian modal motifs, written but not recorded in 1964. As performed (and now recorded) by Ryan Truesdell’s Gil Evans Centennial Project, “Punjab” should leave contemporary composers envious. Evans may have done for Indian classical music (back then recently introduced to the U.S. by Ravi Shankar and taken up by John Coltrane) what he and Miles Davis has done for music from Hispaniola on Sketches of Spain. Evans here balanced jazz riffs and modal themes upon a light, sturdy framework of Western instrumentation. The solos by Dan Weiss on tabla, Wilson on sax and Frank Kimbrough, piano, were compelling. Two tunes later, Evans’ arrangement of John Lewis’s composition “Concorde” contained the kind of pan-cultural joy heard in Messiaen’s masterpiece the Turangalîla-Symphonie.

Truesdell’s set alone was worth my trip to Newport. Yet anyone could watch or hear it stream online thanks to a collaboration between WBGO (Newark) and WGBH (Boston). The video is gone now, but at least 18 live concert recordings from Newport 2012 remain available at www.NPRMusic.org. After 58 years, the Newport Fest keeps giving.

Contact Howard Mandel at jazzmandel@gmail.com

Nate Radley's The Big Eyes.

Nate Radley, a punctilious guitarist, is at Barbes in Brooklyn July 18 with four-fifths of the quintet from The Big Eyes (Fresh Sound New Talent 395). It comprises nine of his original songs, measured in tone and tempo, with amorphous melodies that his capable band (Loren Stillman, alto sax; Pete Rende, Fender Rhodes piano, who won’t be at the performance; Matt Pavolka, bass; Ted Poor, drums) flesh out in various combinations. Though too ruminative by half for my taste, Radley and company make the most of dynamics and interplay to build tension and arrive at release. Barbes is tiny; it will get hot.

Tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen brings The Third Incarnation, a septet plus four guest sitters-in, to S.O.B.’s July 19, and that group will obviously sound bigger, if not necessarily better, than The Matador and the Bull (Savant), his new trio album. Commanding in the honorable though prescribed post-Coltrane style, Allen is offset by bassist Gregg August and drummer Rudy Royston as he has beenon three other records since 2008. Their balance is impeccable, though they expand on Allen’s launching motifs and stream-of-consciousness improvs by each operating in their own fields, connected mostly by mood. On the sixth track of 12, “Paseillo,” the trio suddenly syncs in an upbeat, swinging abstraction over “Sweet Georgia Brown” chords—up till then, they’ve been somber if not sorrowful, and that major mode does not reappear. The format has its limitations and on CD grows repetitious, though live it’s probably compelling.

J.D. Allen Trio: The Matador and the Bull.

Rez Abbasi, a guitarist/composer appearing in quartet at Cornelia Street Café on July 20, was born in Karachi, Pakistan, but grew up in California. On ENJA Records’ Suno Suno (“listen listen” in Urdu) he convenes an ensemble called Invocation with alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, who’s of South Asian ancestry but grew up in Colorado; pianist Vijay Iyer, who’s of South Asian ancestry but grew up in Buffalo (and whose own trio is at the MOMA sculpture garden on July 29); bassist Johannes Weidenmueller (from Germany, steeped in Spanish and New Orleans idioms); and drummer Dan Weiss (born in the USA, listened to rock, played metal, attended Berklee, studies tabla with Samir Chatterjee). They make music reflecting Abbasi’s interest in Qawwali religious repertoire of the Indian subcontinent.

Rather than appropriating that tradition’s melodic content or imitating its repetitive phraseology, Abbasi constructs multilayered compositions with lots of detailed moving parts, inspired, so he writes in liner notes, by “feeling.” Though the instrumental work is excellent, the program requires repeated listening to absorb and won’t satisfy anyone looking for a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan tribute or a recognizable hybrid. The cross-culturalization results in something essentially without precedent, though its creators obviously know a lot about a lot of music. This is new. So let’s call it jazz.

About 45 people heard the rambunctious nonet led by high-energy trombonist Craig Harris in a cozy basement studio at the Dwyer Cultural Center on June 25. It was the last “Musical Monday” of the band’s seven-month, once-a-week gig, because the Dwyer, on 123rd Street between St. Nicholas Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, is cutting hours and reducing public programs while seeking funding. Good luck with that.

The audience included black and white folks, singles, elders, couples and one family with young, semi-attentive kids. The music ranged from a wicked vamp—people danced in their seats—to spacey sound effects triggered by an electri keyboardist on a computer set at his feet.

A version of Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” was arranged over a rhythm as cushy as that of Grover Washington’s smooth jazz classic, “Mr. Magic.” Soprano saxophonist Jay Rodriguez blew a knotty yet flowing solo atop a samba beat, like something Wayne Shorter might have done in Weather Report; two other saxes and two trumpets joined with brisk riffs which Harris waved in, spontaneously.

The performance climaxed with an episode of tradition-steeped collective improvisation. Adept listeners followed the tangle of melodic threads that emerged from and resolved back into a full statement of Harris’ sweeping, lyrical melody, “Lovejoy.” It ended in a slow fade.

The music was first-rate, and immediacy ruled. “It’s not that we don’t know what we’re doing,” Harris, a 59-year-old committed Harlem homeowner, explained at the show’s start. “It’s that we don’t want to know. This is how we roll. We do a lot of making up.”

The crowd was delighted to go where his band took them; they had come for sonic adventure. The musicians were pleased with their efforts. The room pulsed with trust.

As a venue, it was neither expensive or boozy but homey. Plastic champagne glasses of bubbly cider were free with the $10 admission. Light bulbs shaped like votive candles glowed on little round tables draped in black. Strangers made pleasant conversation with each other.

The loss of a community arts center can seem a small thing in culturally abundant New York City, but it matters. The Dwyer opened in 2009 as the nonprofit institution the city required for a real estate developer to turn what was an abandoned warehouse into residential condos and street-level stores. For three years it has hosted visual arts exhibits, film screenings and dance performances as well as music. Its main income stream has been rentals for private events, but it can’t meet its relatively modest overhead.

Common story: A nice place with a localized mission needs money. There goes a seven-month, once-a-week gig. Oh, the musicians will find another room; they’ve got to play. The customers will look for a new hangout. But the city is poorer for the loss.

“We’ll be back in September,” promised Harris, a veteran of ensembles fronted by his pal David Murray and the great Sun Ra and a determined optimist. “Right now we just don’t know where.”

Reach Howard Mandel at jazzmandel@ gmail.com.

If you were to have walked into the Blue Note at 4 p.m. on June 20, you’d have heard guitar wiz Gabriel Marin improvising microtonal figures with a Middle Eastern tinge on double-necked guitar, electric bassist John Ferrara by his side. You could have grabbed a bottle of Brother Thelonious ale and plate of appetizers and, spying a friend across the room, navigated a mass of famous musicians, music journalists and significant others from the inner circles of the jazz industry/community, then schmoozed until MC Josh Jackson from WBGO introduced local “jazz heroes” Robin Bell-Stevens, executive director of JazzMobile, and Adrian Ellis, late of Jazz at Lincoln Center. You’d have been at the 2012 Jazz Awards.

Jazz honors are bestowed publicly in New York City twice a year: in January, when the National Endowment of the Arts celebrates Jazz Masters, and in June, when the Jazz Journalists Association hails excellence in music and media.

The JJA gala cocktail party, open to the public—with 13 related parties from Auckland, New Zealand, to Tucson, Ariz.—is a grassroots initiative produced by the music’s professional observers and biggest fans. Awards include Lifetime Achievement, Up and Coming Musician of the Year, Players of the Year for all instruments and Best Record, Book, Blog, Periodical and Website. Winners are selected through two stages of voting by the organization’s journalist members.

We (I’m president of the JJA) provide food, wine, beer and entertainment—this year, alongside Marin and Ferrara, were the Organ Monk Quartet and singer Paulette McWilliams with pianist Nat Adderley Jr. The awards are announced and presented from the stage. Party favors include new CDs. A good time is had by all.

But why? Isn’t media attention, paying gigs and applause enough to thank jazz people for what they do?

Well, no. Most artists crave attention, and maybe especially jazz musicians, for whom the main rewards of the American entertainment industry—money and fame—are remote, but who strive to be productive, creative and expressive anyway. Then there’s the fact that almost everybody loves a party, and the JJA’s New York City Jazz Awards party is one of the few opportunities for players, pundits, producers, presenters and devotees to share face time without being shushed ’cause there’s a gig going on.

But the real reason we hold the Jazz Awards is to make some noise about jazz itself. This great American art form underlies nearly all American music made today, a point seldom articulated by the NEA, the Grammies or other entities promoting culture here and now, but demonstrably true.

Why jazz is overlooked and underappreciated is a topic worthy of discussion; I think it’s taken for granted. Americans are improvisers by nature. We dig elegant and hard-driving rhythms. Given a basic melody line, we belt it out our way. That’s jazz, folks, as vital a base of our social interactions as democracy and freedom of speech or action. Of course we should applaud those who do jazz best, and those who let us know about them. Praise jazz!

Contact Howard Mandel at jazzmandel@gmail.com

Joe McPhee

A festival of avant-garde visions

by Howard Mandel

The old-school avant-garde is now! The 17th annual Vision Festival is a seven-night, 37-event assertion by proudly unfettered improvisers that the 50-year-old principles of high energy and exploratory alternatives to traditional and “commercial” jazz still thrive.

Real estate realities have pushed this Fest from its East Village roots to a new stage: Roulette, in Brooklyn, of course. But the proud DIY esthetic and energizing, raw or extreme generation of sounds that were once shocking and now are less so, a signal the musician puts his all on the line, still apply. See the schedule at artsforart.org/event/visionfestival17/schedule.

With individualistic multi-instrumentalist (mostly sax and trumpet) Joe McPhee being honored for “a lifetime of achievement”; a revised version of The Gardens of Harlem, the late Clifford Thornton’s 1974 orchestra suite, as its centerpiece; and concerts led by two handfuls of the most iconoclastic sexta- and septuagenarian instrumentalists on the planet—among them Charles Gayle, Kidd Jordan, Connie Crothers, Dave Burrell, Sonny Simmons, Wadada Leo Smith, Elliott Sharp, singer Sheila Jordan and poet Amiri Baraka—the Vision Fest best might seem to be in search of lost time.
But with the participation, too, of up-n-comers including Gerald Clayton, Darius Jones, Matts Gustaffson, Mary Halvorson, Taylor Ho Bynum, Craig Taborn, Jeff Parker, Ingrid Laubrock and Nicole Mitchell, it’s evident that valuing musical expressivity more than musical structure is also attractive to players who weren’t around to hear Albert Ayler and John Coltrane live—they take the thrust of 1960s “free jazz” as seriously as if they had been.

That free jazz movement of the ’60s had a sociopolitical agenda to demonstrate empowerment, rip away jazz’s deadwood and shake the establishment, as well as to let loose youthful juice.

The mission of the Vision Fest retains a lot of the ancient aura. It was born in the East Village out of a cadre that buzzed around bassist William Parker; Patricia Nicholson Parker, his wife but a force (choreographer/dancer) in her own right, runs the show and the nonprofit producing group, Arts for Art, from an LES office at the “educational and cultural center” Clemente Soto Velez.

Parker believes in grounding her production in critical thinking; I assume that’s why I’m a panelist discussing “Free Jazz/Free Music—Why Then/Why Now?” Thursday, June 14, from 5 to 7 p.m. She also believes in mixing media, so there are visual artists painting the music, videographers, dancers and poets on each program. And she’s big on making music available to all, so on Friday afternoon, June 15, there are free events in partnership with the New York City Housing Authority at Rutgers Houses, 200 Madison St.

Choosing one night, I’d attend June 16 to hear trombonist Steve Swell’s Quintet; French bassist Joelle Leandre with flutist Mitchell and baritone Thomas Buckner; Trio 3 (Oliver Lake, reeds; Reggie Workman, bass; Andrew Cyrille, drums); and violinist-composer Jason Kao Hwang’s Burning Bridge, with Chinese pipa and erhu in the band.
Roulette is a good bet for Vision 17, Manhattan being too upscale for unvarnished radicalism. Undaunted by age, economics or fashion, the Vision survives.

Reach Howard Mandel at jazzmandel@gmail.com

Marcus Roberts sets his own rules

Jazz musicians pushing beyond the standard deviations advance the art form, and pianist Marcus Roberts stands out among many excellent current keyboard players with a thrust all his own.

Performing the 1920s classics of Jelly Roll Morton faithfully yet also revised at Jazz at Lincoln Center May 11 and 12, and collaborating with banjoist Bela Fleck on record and at the Blue Note June 5 through 10, Roberts has been and will be neither strict neo-conservative nor outright populist, not representative of trends nor an outlying iconoclast. He’s his own man, creating quite freely within explicit structures, exploring new associations while asserting uncompromised individuality. Roberts’ music is odd, interesting, utterly unpredictable and fun to hear.

In Western European classical music, one knows how the music goes and takes satisfaction in its realization. In jazz, we may know what the musicians start with, but thrill to follow their improvised paths forward, unsure of how and where they’ll arrive. Jelly Roll Morton’s compositions for his Red Hot Peppers are highly specific, recalled with precision by fans. Roberts, who is blind, took transcriptions of Morton’s recordings and reharmonized them to get new, rich, coloristic blends from trumpet, trombone, two saxophones, clarinet, piano, bass and drums.

That JALC-associated ’bone player Ron Westray, tenor saxist Stephen Riley and three young men who were Roberts’ students at Florida State University had startlingly different soloing styles, stretching out in ways Morton couldn’t have imagined but might well have applauded, didn’t bug their leader at all. Indeed, on “Grandpa’s Spells,” “The Chant,” “Deadman Blues,” “Dr. Jazz,” “Original Jelly Roll Blues,” “Winin’ Boy” and “The Pearls,” Roberts strived to play nothing like Morton, coming up with strategies for each of his featured episodes that seemed capricious, if not random.

Morton was no roughhouse blues and boogie guy; he filtered 19th-century European romanticism and bordello flourishes into syncopated stride and in ensembles was unfailingly supportive. Roberts, however, laid out right-hand-only single note lines with perverse restraint of momentum, threw down power chords and clusters in a frenzy, concentrated for a chorus on the bell-like highest notes of the piano and added contrasts and comments to his horn players’ efforts.

Westray blew like a burbling brook, Riley employed a strangely hollow, hoarse tone on anarchic, late-swing era fragments of phrases, and the kids Joe Goldberg (clarinet), Alphonso Horne (trumpet) and Ricardo Pascal (tenor and soprano saxes) walked the line between Hot Peppers fidelity and their personal impulses, usually sustaining the balance. The concert I heard, the first of two, was fascinating, though the band hadn’t completely jelled. Drummer Jason Marsalis kept strict time, right on top of Roberts in duet on “King Porter Stomp”; he and bassist Rodney Jordan are Roberts’ regular partners.

Piano and banjo are rarely heard together, but Bela Fleck is a rare banjoist, and with Roberts’ trio on Across the Imaginary Divide, the combination sounds natural. Roberts is stately at moments, folksy at others, delving into tango and blues. This may not be jazz, or it may be an unexpected expansion of the art. Who cares? It’s fun to hear.

Reach Howard Mandel at jazzmandel@gmail.com

According to Moon, whose wild-style percussive poetry makes explicit Dapp Theory’s claim to be a hip-hop/jazz hybrid, the world’s a mess. Our government’s agenda demands scrutinyIs it our agenda? he asks, incredulous. And he’s driven nearly mad, in another tune, by the jerk he meets in the mirror. 

I’m not you, he says that the jerk tells him in no uncertain terms. You’re me! 

Dire warnings and Kafkaesque psychosismusic to my ears, which aren’t often drawn to jazz ‘n’ polemics, though there have been other exceptions. Years ago, when jazz and related varieties of free-funk improv were assumed to be the expressive forms of the culture of resistance, I found the Last Poets (The white man/Has a God complex), Defunkt (guitarist Vernon Reid roaring through little ditties on topics like Thermonuclear War) and Jayne Cortez’s Firespitters (If your drum is a woman/Why do you beat your woman?) pretty damn bracing. But that was then. Now jazz, like everything else, is considered little more than a bauble in the culture of consumerism. Or so the talk went during an IAJE panel on Jazz, Politics and the American Identity, in which South Asian-American pianist Vijay Iyer and New Orleans trumpeter Irvin Mayfield presented different points on the range of what players believe their proper roles should be.

Iyer, whose work with an extended circle of genre-defying collaborators has been characteristically provocative if not outright subversive, suggested that in the ’60s jazz musicians (like rockers and blues people and certain salsa progressivesEddie Palmieri, for one) believed that they were part of the solution or part of the problem, and that maybe musicians should consider that distinction again. Mayfield, who has recently been acclaimed for his wrenching slow rendition of Just a Closer Walk With Thee during the Jazz at Lincoln Center Higher Ground concert (now on CD) benefitting Hurricane Katrina victims, respectfully said that he’s not an activist, not a marcher, just a trumpeter: That’s what I do. He did indeed have serious things to say about the treatment of New Orleans, but he declined to take action other than blow his horn. 

I believe that’s his perfect right, and a defensible viewpoint, even though jazz history is rampant with its contradictions. One example even Mayfield alluded to with high regard was Louis Armstrong’s mournful What Did I Do To Be So Black And Blue? But he also reported that in New Orleans, jazz is considered to be a music of celebration and ceremony (as in funeral parades). That kind of marching isn’t for or against anythingit is an act of life, not a statement demanding response.

The music of Dapp Theory, though ostensibly pointed, seemed to have it both ways. Saxophonist Loren Stillman came up with hard lines in his solos, like John Moon having something urgent to say; yet leader Milnes’ piano chords were harmonically richbeautifuland flowed smoothly, even over odd-metered and off-kilter rhythms. The effect was Brechtian, an ironic tension between form and content. That’s so 2006, isn’t it? Jazz reflects, sometimes first and more clearly than other arts, exactly what’s happening all around.