Jazz@Rochester

The more voices the better... Other XRIJF coverage

When I started writing about the Rochester International Jazz Festival in 2005 on this blog's predecessor (it's still out there), there wasn't much coverage of the festival in the local mainstream media—a few stories and some headliner interviews, etc.

With its success and the growing crowds, the festival is being covered widely—much more locally, but also nationally and internationally. It's a testament to the success of the festival itself and why it is becoming known as one of the top jazz and music festivals in the U.S. Check out other XRIJF coverage by our mainstream media outlets at:

• The Democrat & Chronicle's coverage starts with their Jazz section online. There you'll find the stories appearing in the paper. There's also the Arts Blog, where you'll find posts by Jeff Spevak, Anna Reguero, Stuart Low and others. One highlight are the photo essays and other multimedia done by D&C photographer Will Yurman (here's last year's multimedia project).
• Rochester City Newspaper has it's annual Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival Guide. There are listings for each day with links to the bios they've prepared (many of them are the same you'll find on the artist's page on the XRIJF site, with links to artist sites). Or you can look at all the artist bios in one place. City's music writers will all be blogging from the field as well.  I think it will be on the Music Blog.
• Freetime Magazine has a bit different take for their XRIJF Guide. You can click on a venue and they've listed all of the artists who will be appearing there with times, etc.
• This year WHAM Channel 13 has a "Jazz Lounge" where they'll be collecting their XRIJF coverage.

I'll try to link out to other coverage from national as well as local blogs and other sites as I come across them (please feel free to make them known to me).

All this other coverage feels a bit liberating. I've already given you my preliminary "itinerary" for the festival.  I will likely be working at my day job throughout the festival, so I just can't do the daily sum up posts I've been doing in past years. My coverage here will focus on images, short posts and moblogs "from the field," and possibly some short video interviews. I'll be tweeting, of course and, if you're on Twitter, you can follow the tweets of various XRIJF artists who are on Twitter on the list I've created. The posts here and some tweets will end up on the Jazz@Rochester Facebook page as well.  Please feel free to join in on these conversations!

Mostly, I'm going to concentrate on having some fun, hanging with my old "jazz fest buddies," and trying to communicate the experience to you best I can.  See you on Jazz Street!

Another voice is raised up about an unsung jazz legend . . . Andy Bey at Exodus to Jazz

Another voice joins Jazz@Rochester with a review of Friday night's Andy Bey gig for the wonderful Exodus to Jazz series, written by Christopher Teal:

Unsung jazz legend Andy Bey came to Rochester’s Clarion Riverside Hotel on Friday for two sets of fresh interpretations on standards, as well as his own stirring originals. Rounding out a trio with Bey’s piano and vocals were bassist Joe Martin and drummer Vito Lesczak. I have heard Martin on record and live on several occasions with Kurt Rosenwinkel’s bands and he always plays with a focused rhythmic drive—last night being no exception. Lesczak has been playing with Bey for several years in rotation with the legendary Kenny Washington and displayed masterful restraint and in his swinging accompaniment role.

The late set started out with an instrumental version of the standard There is No Greater Love, with Bey’s distinctive piano playing in full effect. Bey displays great patience at the piano, unfolding his ideas with deliberate care. By eschewing traditional left hand accompaniment, he leaves ample space for group interplay. This medium tempo swinger featured plenty of smart rhythmic interaction between the whole trio and an especially spirited solo from Joe Martin.  In the next two selections, a style-shifting workout of All the Things You Are and a pensive rendition of On Second Thought (both featured on his latest album It Ain't Necessarily So, Bey displayed the full capacity of his immense vocal instrument. Able to create a huge array of colors and tones with his four-octave range, Bey belted new life into the warhorse All the Things (a tune that Bey described as being "older than salt") and created an intimately dark tone on On Second Thought. Approaching seventy years of age, Andy Bey’s lyrical interpretations percolate a mix of experience and vitality that bring to mind Jimmy Scott and Bill Withers, but without losing his own unique character.

After two originals, Pretentious, and There Are So Many Ways to Approach the Blues, Bey stepped from behind the piano to perform a vocalese rendition of A Night In Tunisia that included a stellar scat solo riddled with quotes from other bebop classics. Following this closer, Bey was summoned by applause to perform a solo encore of Little Girl Blue that provided a tender close to the set.

This final set for Bey’s trio was also the last of the season for the Exodus to Jazz series. Promoter Jose DaCosta surprised the crowd by unveiling the lineup for the Fall-Winter season of ETJ, which brings back familiar acts as well as some compelling new artists, leaving the crowd with even more to buzz about over the summer.

Christopher Teal is a second-year Masters student at Eastman School of Music in jazz drum and plays with the local band Po' Boys Brass Band, Localized Tenderness out of Spokane, WA, and the Chris Teal Trio. You can find out more about Chris at his website and the MySpace page for Localized Tenderness. We hope to have Chris write more for us while he's here in Rochester. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Tracy got out on Friday . . . I didn't

Just a quick note to point you over to my friend Tracy's writeup on her blog Rochester Music Scene (and Heard) after hearing the Steve Greene Trio with Tina Albright over at the Jazz at Immanuel Series at the Immanuel Baptist Church on Park Avenue. 

At least one of us got out to hear some jazz on Friday.  I'm recovering from a way too hectic week (although I did go to the WGMC benefit Art Loves Jazz at Artworks on Thursday).

The comment box . . .

One of the goals of Jazz@Rochester is to get you all talking to each other about live jazz in Rochester. As you may have noticed, I have been bringing other voices to write guest posts on the blog for awhile. What you may not have noticed is that some of you are also talking . . . in the comments to posts. Recently, we've had some great comments and I wanted to point them out to you, in case you missed them:

• After I published "Another voice from Rochester jazz . . . Drummer Mike Melito" on April 10th, a conversation developed in the comments.  Following Mike, bassist Fred Stone wrote about the jazz scene in Rochester in the 60s and leaving the city at 20 to find new ideas and ways to express himself on the bass and finding it in Boston at the Berklee School of Music.  He returned to Rochester and continues to explore those new ideas, although finding the city a pretty lonely place for his brand of progressive jazz. Fred's comment drew a replies from Mike and from Bob Sneider (perhaps it was the "Blue Note buddies at the Strathallan" aside"?) and even Tracy at Rochester Scene (and Heard) chimed in at the end.
• Some time after I posted Ian Kloss's review of Henderson-Owens Trio featuring Dr. Lonnie Smith,  Sean Jefferson, drummer for Paradigm Shift and The Jazz Mad Lab wrote a second review of the show in a comment (we may hear more from Sean in the future).

A blog (at least this blog) is intended to be a social media, to create, feed and join in on conversations that are going on out there. They serve this purpose mostly through comments and through linking to other bloggers; in short, interacting with the conversation. I think they add to the knowledge and the community of jazz here.  For me, these comments are an example of this blog serving that purpose.  I've had over 100 comments in the past 2 years, but there are few instances where they start resembling that conversation. I want to encourage that.

How do you do it yourself?  To read or leave a comment, just click on the Comments link at the bottom of each post. If you're leaving a comment, it is simply a matter of filling in the "boxes" and hitting the button (you'll have to fill in a captcha after that). If you're reading, I hope you feel compelled to join the conversation. My comment policy is pretty simple (for a recovering lawyer, that's saying a lot...):

No spam, stay on topic, play nice, and only put in links where you're guiding my readers to relevant resources or information.

I may expand on this in the "I Told You So..." page, but there it is.  Let's get on with the conversation!

There was a Doctor in the house . . . Ian Kloss joins the voices on Jazz@Rochester and reviews Dr. Lonnie Smith at Exodus to Jazz

Thanks to one of our previous voices, Jazz@Rochester was introduced to Ian Kloss, who is the latest occasional voice that will be read in these pages. Ian is just completing a Bachelors degree in jazz guitar at Eastman School of Music and is staying on for a extra year to focus on art criticism. He's performed at the Rochester International Jazz Festival with the Eastman group Hunter and Bear and will be doing so again this year. He's the regular guitarist in the Ben Britton Band (formerly known as Sonic Duality) and sits in occasionally with Dubblestuff. Ian took in the Henderson-Owens Trio featuring Dr. Lonnie Smith last night in another installment of the wonderful Exodus to Jazz series. Here's what Ian sent in:

Dr. Lonnie Smith . . . he could very easily be the funkiest person alive. Last night (Thursday, April 12) at the Riverside Clarion Hotel, the legendary organist returned to Rochester with a trio featuring Brooklyn-based ace drummer Ulysses Owens and local guitarist Mel Henderson, who is a core member of funk-fusion group Paradigm Shift. At 65, Smith is as vigorous and unpredictable as ever, cutting loose on his B-3 with an intensely physical approach. In the hour-plus first set, Smith led the band through a varied collection of tunes that favored simple harmonies and rolling grooves, allowing Smith’s unparalleled mastery of phrasing to shine. Highlights included “Willow Weep for Us,” Smith’s playful take on “Willow Weep for Me,” and “Nawlin’s,” the blues-funk standard that served as the group’s closer. Another interesting moment came when Smith indulged his love of guttural, expressive singing on a sped-up, much-funkified version of the Beatles’ “Come Together.” I could ramble for some time about Smith’s great qualities, including his impressive control of his instrument’s sound, summoning an astonishing range of tones and dynamics.

Smith’s strongest rapport was with Owens, a young drummer who’s already made a name playing with a long list of straight-ahead greats. Owens’ flexibility, and his comprehensive use of his drum set’s palette of sounds, make him a great match for the good Doctor. The group dealt gamely with the sonic demands of the space, an echo-prone banquet hall that sometimes made Smith’s more subtle playing difficult to hear. There was also a P.A. system which may or may not have been necessary (for one thing, it made the bass pretty overpowering). The sound was adjusted, for the better, after the first couple of tunes, and it was smooth sailing from there.

Smith deserves his reputation as a jazz ambassador. When he made the rounds after the set, cordially greeting everyone in the audience- strangers and old friends alike- it was like seeing a mysterious foreign dignitary in action. Smith cut a great figure in his instantly-recognizable concert attire. Although his clothes of choice (including his famous turban) resemble traditional Sikh garb, Smith once explained that he favors these duds for “no particular reason.” The audience was with him, and the group as a whole, all the way.

Exodus to Jazz founder Jose DaCosta gave a brief pre-concert address. It was good to catch this talk, as DaCosta laid out some of the upcoming Exodus lineup, including famed jazz saxophonist Seamus Blake, who recently sat in with Helen Sung at her ETJ performance when her sax player was ill) and an almost unheard-of straight ahead set by smooth jazz saxophonist Mindi Abair (here's the schedule for the rest of the Spring season of ETJ). For anybody who didn’t catch Smith this time out, the good news is that he’ll be back in town as part of this year’s exciting RIJF schedule.

Thanks, Ian!  We hope to hear some more from you in the coming months.  Please feel free to leave Ian a comment in by clicking on the comment link below. 

Another voice from Rochester jazz . . . Drummer Mike Melito

As I've promised, I'm trying to add new voices to Jazz@Rochester. I've heard today's guest post writer, drummer Mike Melito, a lot over the past few years, playing with various groupings with Bob Sneider and Phil Flanagan and others at the Strathallan, and sitting in with a number of other artists such as James Moody and Benny Golson at the RIJF. I've heard him enough that I can recognize Mike's style even before I see his smiling face. He's just a great guy and I'm glad he's willing to write some stuff for my readers. I asked Mike to write a bit about being an jazz artist here in Rochester and he sent in the following:

I’ve been a professional jazz musician in Rochester for 25 years. The jazz scene here has changed quite a bit over the years. Some years there would be all kinds of gigs and other years not as many. I would do quite a bit of driving between playing gigs in Buffalo, Syracuse and Utica as well. I can say that today Rochester probably has the most venues for jazz out of all those cities. I’ve been asked many times by people why I never moved to NYC? There are a few reasons but the main reason is the players I get to play every week here are every bit as good as most guys in NYC. I think there is a misconception about New York. People think if you live in New York you must be great. That is totally not true!! I’ve played with many guys who live in NYC and make a good living in jazz that can’t touch the guys I play with here every week.

My regular Strathallan gig has been going great! We’ve had some great guests come in to play with us. Guests have included Vincent Herring, Grant Stewart, Ralph Lalama, John Nugent, John Swana, Peter Bernstein, Ken Peplowski, Harry Allen, Don Menza, Frank Strazzeri, Rachel Z, Todd Coolman, Gerry Niewood, Pat Labarbera and many more. Bob Sneider has done a TREMENDOUS job with booking all these guests. Look for many more guests to come as well. The next guests to come are three on the same weekend! Trumpeter Jim Rotondi, bassist Lee Hudson and my brother drummer Tom Melito all play the Strathallan the weekend of April 11th and 12th. That should be a GREAT weekend! Having Bob Sneider, Paul Hofmann or Bill Dobbins on piano will be equally exciting! We play every Friday and Saturday night from 8:30pm to 12:00 am. No Cover!

I recently recorded a new CD that should be out in the summer. It’s called In The Tradition and features Grant Stewart on tenor, John Swana on trumpet, Bob Sneider, Paul Hofmann and bassist Neal Miner. I’m very proud of this record. It came out well! There are some great tunes by Hank Mobley, Sonny Clark, Tadd Dameron, plus some originals too. Stay tuned . . . .

Watch for Mike's album on my Rochester Sounds page in the future and check out his albums now on CDBaby.com.  I'm sure we'll hear (and read) more from him in the future. By the way, feel free to leave a comment and let me know who you'd like to hear from and I'll see if I can get them to write something up.