The 16th annual Chicago Jazz Festival closed on an exuberant note over the weekend, with the horns of the Gerald Wilson Orchestra roaring exultantly for an enthusiastic, if soggy, crowd.
Despite the rains that fell through most of Sunday night’s finale, the audience refused to flee before the last notes were sounded. Such devotion was easy to understand, considering that the lineup proved the most consistently successful of the weekend’s offerings.
Certainly each of the preceding nights had had its flaws. On Friday, Jeanie Bryson had mined every cliche of the jazz singer’s art, while pianist Horace Silver’s usually jubilant Silver/Brass Ensemble had been significantly diminished by the notoriously unreliable sound system at Grant Park.
On Saturday, singer Kevin Mahogany unwittingly had proven that top-notch male jazz vocalists remain hard to find, and Jon Jang and the Pan Asian Arkestra had produced one of the most pretentious and crushingly boring sets of this year’s festival.
Sunday’s lineup, however, proved triumphant virtually from top to bottom, with nearly every act playing at peak form for an audience of 65,000 (bringing the weekend’s total to 245,000).
The Gerald Wilson Orchestra had been convened to celebrate the maestro’s 76th birthday (on Sunday), to mark his 50th year as a bandleader and, implicitly, to shatter enduring myths about West Coast jazz. As California-based Wilson and his all-star band reaffirmed during their combustive set, the West Coast has given jazz a signature orchestral sound as well as some of its most brilliant soloists.
As an ensemble, this band showed every bit as much energy, drive and discipline as its Midwestern and Eastern counterparts. In addition, however, it offered an unmistakable regional flavor of its own. In a breezy jazz waltz, for instance, Wilson’s band exuded an understated sense of swing, a hip swagger in its articulation of rhythms and even a hint of pop-tune phrasings that vividly declared the band’s California origins.
In “Carlos,” the set’s tour de force, trumpeter Oscar Brashear played solos steeped in Spanish melodic and harmonic forms, while the band accompanied with vintage Spanish dance rhythms that remain a significant influence on music of the West Coast. As a beguiling coda, Wilson’s band played the world premiere of his “State Street Suite,” a blues-tinged tip of the hat to our city.
If Chicago’s approach to jazz traditionally has been more extroverted and avant-garde than California’s, that point was reiterated forcefully by Chicago tenor giant Fred Anderson’s Reunion Band. Anderson, a justly revered figure in the jazz revolutions of the past 30-odd years, led a set that gave deeper meaning to the term “free jazz.”
In other words, these improvisations were only “free” of traditional triadic harmony and standard meters. But there was order and clarity in the riffing among Anderson and saxophonists Kidd Jordan and Douglas Ewart, and in the dialogues between the hard-charging reed players and the brass exhortations of trumpeter Billy Brimfield and trombonist George Lewis.
Among the evening’s other hits, vibists Milt Jackson and Bobby Hutcherson played ebullient duets; drummer Arthur Taylor proved once again that his Wailers stand among the most incendiary hard-bop bands of the ’90s; and Chicago clarinetist Chuck Hedges led his Swingtet in impeccable variations on classic swing themes.
If the workmanlike duo of tenor saxophonist Houston Person and singer Etta Jones seemed ordinary by comparison, that was because they were sharing a stage with some of the most formidable virtuosos in the business.
