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Caramoor
has been featuring jazz since 1990. |
By
Thomas Staudter |
The estate’s Tapestry Hedge picnic grounds, the delight
of strolling couples.
Tell
friends that your summer plans include attending a jazz
festival, and most will assume that you’re on your
way to Newport, Monterey or maybe Perugia for UmbriaJazz.
Say you’ll be at the
jazz festival at Caramoor – the splendid 90-acre Katonah
estate north of New York City – and wait for nodding
approval from the aficionados.
This year the Caramoor International
Music Festival – the legacy of Walter and Lucie Rosen,
art collectors and cultural champions who hosted scores
of concerts open to the public at their villa-style mansion
– celebrates its 60th anniversary. Since 1958, most
of the sumptuous classical music and opera presentations
that have won Caramoor wide renown have been held under
the grand tent of the 1,722-seat Venetian Theater.
Caramoor only began featuring
jazz – one act per season – in 1990, which then
expanded to its present two-day enterprise three years later
when radio host and jazz archivist Jim Luce was tapped to
produce the event. Since then the Caramoor Jazz Festival
has grown in popularity, with headliners like Diana Krall,
Sonny Rollins and John Pizzarelli. Luce carefully constructs
programs that spotlight the genre’s best talents while
acknowledging the music’s rich history. “The
essence here is to draw from all the greatness in jazz today
without forgetting the elements that make this music what
it is,” says Luce. “So, in many ways, we’re
always looking back and looking forward.”
Over the years Luce has relied
on his professional connections to help book the jazz festival;
but in 2003 tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, one of jazz’s
most admired figures and a forceful, effusive improviser,
was signed on as artistic director to “provide a more
expansive vision,” says Luce. It’s a position
the affable, larger-than-life instrumentalist and composer,
now 53, has embraced with characteristic passion and energy,
becoming a ubiquitous presence onstage and off during the
festival, along with his wife, jazz vocalist Judi Silvano.
Scheduled for July 30 and
August 6, the Caramoor Jazz Festival aptly reflects the
notion of honoring jazz’s progenitors through the
gifts of today’s practitioners. Thus, the opening
day’s program, “Modern Jazz at 60,” revisits
the birth of bebop, when the ascendancy of Charlie Parker,
Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and others forever changed
the musical landscape on 52nd Street in Manhattan and beyond.
Fittingly, saxophonist Charles McPherson and trumpeter Tom
Harrell are teaming up for a set called “Bird and
Diz Live.” Percussionists Billy Hart, Andrew Cyrille
and Michael Carvin will recall the feats of legendary drummer
Max Roach; Lovano will appear with Saxophone Summit partners
Michael Brecker and Dave Liebman; and drummer Ben Riley’s
Monk Legacy Septet and Mingus Dynasty, a repertory ensemble
devoted to the works of bassist-composer Charles Mingus,
will perform.
Meanwhile, in recognition of what would have been the 90th
birthday of Ol’ Blue Eyes later in the year, the second
day of the festival, billed as “Celebrating Sinatra,”
will conclude with a special evening concert featuring an
all-star ensemble led by Lovano with vocal interpretations
from Silvano, Tom Lellis and Giacomo Gates. Earlier on,
the afternoon sets feature a virtual jazz smorgasbord. Commencing
with Lovano and drummer Francesco Mela guesting with a quartet
from the Berklee College of Music, other artists will include
vocalist Luciana Souza; pianist Bill Charlap with his acclaimed
trio in one set, then joined by trombonist Steve Turre;
plus pianist Benny Green and guitarist Russell Malone as
a duo.
| Caramoor
Jazz Festival |
| July
30, August 6
914.232.1252
www.caramoor.org |
|
Lovano will be an unannounced
guest during several of the festival’s acts; indeed,
he admits that getting to play with the other musicians
on the bill is a perk he enjoys as artistic director, adding,
“Sometimes you just can’t help yourself.”
|
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Joe Lovano – “A Very Restless
Musical Spirit”
| |
Joe Lovano’s last two albums.
George Mraz, Hank Jones, Lovano and Paul Motian. |
In 1985 Joe Lovano recorded his first album as a leader
and, since then, the titan of the tenor saxophone has risen
to become a superstar in the jazz firmament, praised
by fans, critics and peers alike. Said Gary Smulyan, a baritone
saxophonist who has been working on bandstands with Lovano
since 1978: “Joe is undoubtedly one of the most influential
tenor players of his generation. The depth and breadth of
his expression seems to be unlimited, and you can never
pigeonhole his style of playing: He’s able to move
from beautiful ballads to completely free improvisation
at the drop of a hat. Best of all, Joe’s a very restless
musical spirit. He’s constantly looking toward the
next opportunity to create something meaningful.”
Remarkably, the number of
musical connections Lovano makes in the jazz world continues
to add up, and yet he never seems to abandon the past partnerships.
Back in the early 80s, for instance, he started working
in a trio with guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Paul Motian
that centered most of its repertoire on a new arrangement
of Monk compositions. A quarter of a century later, the
trio (with whom Lovano made his Caramoor debut back in the
mid-90s) is still going strong, embarking on short tours
when possible and even recording. Its latest album, I
Have the Room Above Her, was released earlier this
year.
Finding new musical adventures,
indeed, has been a distinguishing factor throughout Lovano’s
career – and a result of digging in early with some
of the colleagues his father, Tony “Big T” Lovano,
a respected tenor saxophonist, had played with regularly.
Lovano was urged by his father to start on the alto sax
as a teenager. “A big part of my development was getting
to a point where I’d be accepted by the people my
dad was playing with,” the Cleveland, OH, native says,
“and that’s what has stayed with me more than
anything else.” Lovano eventually switched to tenor
sax; and, after graduating in 1974 from Berklee College
of Music in Boston, he enhanced his personality on his instrument
by working in bluesy organ trios with the likes of Dr. Lonnie
Smith and Brother Jack McDuff.
An invitation at 23 to join
Woody Herman’s Young Thundering Herd was further validation
of the musical direction that Lovano’s father helped
him achieve. “The idea was for me to be entirely comfortable
on the bandstand with somebody from Woody’s generation
and to have someone like him dig my playing,” the
saxophonist says. Three years later another venerable big
band leader recruited him – drummer Mel Lewis, who
was then piloting the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. But before
long Lovano began fronting his own small groups and working
collaboratively with so many different musicians and artists
that listing them practically constitutes an encyclopedic
exercise.
Lovano has earned numerous accolades over the years, including
a 2000 Grammy Award for his nonet album 52nd Street
Themes. Last year he released a quartet recording with
pianist Hank Jones, I’m All For You: Ballad Songbook,
which was a critical and popular success, coinciding nicely,
too, with the star-studded 86th birthday celebration for
Jones last July at Caramoor. “Again, it goes back
to developing those multigenerational relationships,”
explains Lovano regarding the quartet’s particular
alchemy.
After playing with Jones
and two longtime associates in the rhythm section –
bassist George Mraz and Paul Motian – all summer long,
adding to their repertoire, he says, “it made perfect
sense to come home and go into the studio to document the
way we sounded.” The just-released Joyous Encounter
– the first time in his career Lovano has recorded
two albums in a row with the same group of musicians –
encompasses some of the balladry that first drew audiences
to the quartet while offering upbeat nods on several tunes
to Jones’s two brothers, both now deceased, who also
left their mark on jazz: famed trumpeter-arranger Thad and
powerhouse drummer Elvin, best known for his bedrocking
of the John Coltrane Quartet. It’s one of those albums
that jazz fans of all stripes will be able to embrace. |
|
Bill Charlap – Conjuring Up the
Magic
| |
The Bill Charlap Trio.
Bill Charlap’s newest release.
|
When it comes to matching the push and verve you’d expect
of masterful improvisers with a reverence for the songs –
or “standards,” if you will – that have
long served as creative templates for jazz artists, few have
succeeded in recent years like pianist Bill Charlap. His vast
knowledge of the Great American Songbook – the music
from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway that helped define our 20th-century
cultural life – and his virtuoso gifts have resulted
in an art that brims with ideas. Indeed, his strengths as
a leader are so luminous and so compelling that each performance
reaches for the sublime. Since 1998 he has worked mostly in
a trio with bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington
(no relation), recalling for many the superlative wonders
achieved by the late Tommy Flanagan with the same rhythm section.
More than a generation removed from Flanagan, however, Charlap,
now 38, exhibits the same wise, almost uncanny understanding
of what jazz audiences desire that you see in jazz elders.
Simply, he knows how to make “the familiar” entirely
new each time he sits down at the piano.
On Charlap’s upcoming
album, Bill Charlap Plays George Gershwin – The
American Soul, his 12th as a leader, the pianist employs
his trio mates to support a frontline out of a jazz fan’s
dream – saxophonists Phil Woods and Frank Wess, trombonist
Slide Hampton and trumpeter Nicholas Payton – that gives
credence to the notion that jazz should always be looking
back as it moves forward, with veterans inspiring younger
cats and vice versa. Says Lovano: “If you’re really
involved in this music, it’s not just who you are –
it’s how you adapt to the people around you. The more
you absorb as a player, the more versatile you become. Bill
has an amazing vocabulary within his immense repertoire of
standards, his originals and everything else, so he’s
able to take shape with whom he’s playing plus provide
key soloing. He really knows how to conjure up the magic.”
The sensitivity and knowing
with which Charlap approaches Gershwin – or Jerome Kern,
Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers or Cole Porter for that matter
– can be said to have been learned firsthand, in fact,
and from some of the masters themselves. The son of Mark “Moose”
Charlap, a celebrated Broadway composer best known for Peter
Pan, and Sandy Stewart, a popular singer who first came
up with Benny Goodman, Charlap says he always remembers playing
the piano, “but there wasn’t any stress –
just encouragement.” Some of the best known creators
of American popular songs – like lyricist E.Y. Harburg
of “Over the Rainbow” fame, whom Charlap called
“Uncle Yip,” as well as Charles Strouse and Jule
Styne – were friends of Charlap’s parents and
frequent guests at their Manhattan home while he was growing
up, giving him, he says, many opportunities to hear music
being worked on “by people I knew well.”
Still, it’s the example
of his parents that strikes Charlap most today, he says. Although
he was only 7 when his father died, Charlap recalls the passion
and directedness that marked his life. As for his mother,
with whom he has recorded a forthcoming duet album, Charlap
admires “her way of getting to the core of her emotionalism
when she expresses herself musically, which is important for
a singer.”
Sticking with classical and
jazz piano studies through graduation from New York’s
High School of Performing Arts, Charlap finished two years
at SUNY Purchase College before a recommendation from pianist
Bill Mays helped him land a job working with baritone sax
star and “cool jazz” pioneer Gerry Mulligan. His
prowess as an accompanist earned him gigs with Tony Bennett
and Sheila Jordan as well; and, in 1995, he joined the Phil
Woods Quintet, an association that continues today.
“There’s a standard
of excellence that is a given with an artist like Phil Woods,”
Charlap says. “When you’re playing with a true
virtuoso, it automatically influences you to do your best.
I never think about being entrenched in the ‘jazz tradition’
when I’m at the piano. Just playing music that I love
is what I keep my focus on.”
Charlap’s Gershwin album
comes on the heels of Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard
Bernstein, a straight trio date, and both works highlight
the tremendous chemistry the pianist has developed with his
rhythm section: Their lyrical moments shimmer, yet few units
can swing as hard as these three can. The group has certainly
established itself as one of the best piano trios working
in jazz today, but Charlap, modestly so, discourages any comparisons
or plaudits. “Our feeling is that the music matters
the most,” he says. “We’re all fans, well-listened,
with a great deal of knowledge about what’s come before
us but, if our playing comes out naturally, then we’ll
end up sounding like ourselves without being anachronistic.”
Looking back while moving forward,
again. |
|
| Thomas
Staudter is an educator and freelance writer whose work appears
regularly in The New York Times, Down Beat and other
publications. He lives in Westchester County, NY. |
|
Photo
credit:
Image 1: Courtesy of Harrison Edwards, Inc.; image 2: Courtesy
of Harrison Edwards, Inc.; image 3: John Abbott; image 4:
Courtesy of Blue Note Records; image 5: Courtesy of Blue Note
Records; image 6: Jimmy Katz; image 7: Carol Friedman; image
8: Donald Dietz; image 9: Courtesy of Blue Note Records. |
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