The pleasures and frustrations of the Chicago Jazz Festival were plain to behold over the weekend at Grant Park, where sublime musicmaking shared the bill with garish noise.
Perhaps the unevenness helped explain the lackluster turnout, with large sections of seats unfilled Saturday night despite the free admission.
On the plus side, the most satisfying performance on Saturday evening came from alto saxophonist Greg Osby, whose quartet transcended already high expectations. Beyond the appeal of Osby’s keening, virtually vibratoless tone, his melodic invention and harmonic ingenuity would have been fascinating to hear even if he had been on stage alone.
Here is an improviser whose rhythmic ideas change every bar, whose concepts of phrase and line are so original and fluid that one never can guess in which direction his themes will dart next. These skittering lines–which practically laugh at traditional key signatures–represent improvisation of unrelenting creativity.
Beneath Osby’s mercurial phrases, pianist Jason Moran produces a great swirl of sound, his block chords, double octaves and pitch clusters rumbling throughout. With comparably restless rhythms from bassist Calvin Jones and drummer Derrek Phillips, the quartet stands among the most provocative in mainstream jazz, its language at once harmonically complex yet melodically urgent.
But when an ensemble several times larger than the Osby quartet takes the stage of the Petrillo Music Shell, the results can be poor, as they were when the great composer-bandleader Gerald Wilson and his orchestra closed Saturday night’s concert. Though the most tuneful portions of Wilson’s “State Street Sweet” could be discerned, the rapid-fire orchestral passages in “Lake Shore Drive” were practically lost in a sea of amplification.
If possible, the Bobby Sanabria Big Band sounded even worse, and not just because the volume had been cranked up to nearly intolerable levels (with many listeners seen covering their ears). Equally significant, the ensemble offered an unusually abrasive approach to Afro-Cuban jazz, with an emphasis on screaming horns, harsh instrumental attacks and extremely taut rhythm.
On a more sensitive note, the David Boykin Expanse opened Saturday evening’s proceedings, with Boykin’s volatile tenor saxophone elegantly counterbalanced by Nicole Mitchell’s poetic flute.
And on Friday night, Chicago conductor Russell Gloyd–a fervent and longtime champion of Dave Brubeck’s concert music–presided over a historic performance of Brubeck’s octet repertoire of the 1940s with the composer at the piano. The festival went to great lengths to revive this repertoire, commissioning Chicago bandleader Jeff Lindberg to transcribe some of these pieces from obscure recordings.
Gloyd and a band of primarily local musicians shed light on these intriguing works. One safely could conclude that Brubeck’s reharmonizations of standard tunes such as “The Way You Look Tonight” were unconventional for the time. The octet arrangements recalled the harmonic techniques of the Miles Davis/Gil Evans “Birth of the Cool” sessions.
Earlier, Kurt Elling proved brilliant when singing scat and vocalese. But his ballads, which dominated this set, were rhythmically torpid and vocally simplistic.
