Sitting at Convocation Hall Thursday night, you got a small taste of what it must have been like to sit in the audiences of the 1940s and 1950s and listen to some of the legendary Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) concerts.
The chance to see Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, Roy Eldridge, Buddy Rich, Coleman Hawkins, Bill Harris et al on the same stage on the same night at the same time must have been amazing.
Of course, the all-star concert concept is ubiquitous now, what with a new jazz or blues festival seeming to pop up (and then disappear) in every second cottage town every second month of the summer.
You would think that the life would have been bashed out of the format long ago... like the interminable and cacophonous drum solos that have ruined many a song and concert. But it ain’t necessarily so.
At least not judging by the vigour and variety of the performances Thursday in the third annual Jazz Lives Concert sponsored by Jazz.FM91.
There is always a fear that such a concert will be an infomercial for the sponsor and its flavoured artist of the month and, indeed, there was a parade of station “personalities” handing out and accepting awards that too often took the pace out of the music.
One is always wary that the “pick one from column A and one from column B” approach will be a disaster, giving a little taste of each jazz “sub-category,” satisfying no one in the end and killing any momentum.
Well, we certainly got variety, but it didn’t feel in any sense like a programming ploy.
Lost in what came later was a positively pulsating opener, What A Little Moonlight Can Do, from Emilie-Claire Barlow.
We had your folk-jazz with singer Kenny Rankin, who was in absolutely brilliant form on Mr. Tambourine Man, which was written by some scriffy guy Rankin worked with as a sideman on an album from the 60s called Bringin’ It All Back Home.
There was Latin from Amanda Martinez. There was your classical-jazz with solo pianist Adam Makowicz. There was your blues-jazz with Jeff Healey and Ross Wooldridge on Fine and Dandy, which they were. There was your future potential superstar jazz with tenor powerhouse Michael Rudy. And there was your pop-jazz with surprise special guest Randy Bachman of The Guess Who.
Bachman grew up in Winnipeg a street away from one of the many jazz poster boys in the category of “brilliant but troubled artist” — Lenny Breau. He performed a tribute to Breau, in the innovator’s guitar style(s) on a wonderful medley that brought broad, knowing smiles of appreciation from bassist Roberto Occupinti and guitarist Reg Schwager, part of the house band for the evening.
There was even New Orleans jazz and, yes, Mississauga gospel-jazz. A Nawlins-style 18-piece brass band made up of some of the Toronto’s stellar players brought the audience back from intermission with a bang.
Then the Mississauga Youth Orchestra spread across the front of the stage and pumped up the pressure with Oh Happy Day.
“I’ve been telling people for years that there is talent in Mississauga,” commented DJ Terry McElligott, a local resident.
The biggest disappointment came, interestingly enough, from the biggest name.
Kurt Elling has a wonderful voice and sings brilliantly (three-time consecutive winner of male vocalist awards from Downbeat and Jazz Times Magazines) but he brought proceedings to a close on a strangely discordant note. He sang two non-standard standards based on solos by Dexter Gordon, star of the movie Round Midnight.
Elling looks a bit like Richard Nixon and seemed to be emulating his high-handed style. His scat-rap-schtick closer, Body and Soul for which he has written new lyrics quickly lost its focus. He virtually demanded, and directed solos, from Occupinti and drummer Davide DiRenzo who looked a bit disconcerted by the experience.
Elling assured us in his closing lyric that he was taking the “old and creaky” and paying tribute in his own small way to the music’s pioneers by carrying on the reinvention and reconfiguration that is the essence of jazz. Right idea, wrong execution. In this case, we were left hungry for one of the classic readings of the standard.
The closing number notwithstanding, 2007 Jazz Lives was a reaffirmation that the music does, indeed, survive if not thrive, and is in very caring hands.
As to the eternal question of exactly what jazz is, here’s some advice from Duke Ellington, given to the late great jazz critic Whitney Balliett in an interview in 1970.
“I don’t think any music should be called jazz. Louis Armstrong plays Louis Armstrong music. Art Tatum plays Art Tatum music. Dizzy Gillespie plays Dizzy Gillespie music and, if it sounds good, that’s all you need.”