Legend, Rising Star Highlight Tanglewood Jazz Festival
Jazz Notes
RIFFS
August 28, 2008
Some critics use chronological age as a crucial standard for measuring talent, just as powerful publicity machines fixate on youth as a prime marketing point for peddling jazz products.
But in the real world of the musicians themselves, there isn't any generation gap, no cultural chasm between Old Masters residing atop Mount Olympus and rising New Masters.
For proof, look only to the lineup this weekend at the Tanglewood Jazz Festival, which features pianist Marian McPartland, the legendary 90-year-old pianist/composer, and pianist/composer Aaron Parks, a rising star of 24 already hailed as a visionary force.
Making her annual Labor Day weekend pilgrimage from her Long Island home to Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., McPartland does a live taping of her Peabody Award-winning National Public Radio series "Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz" Saturday at 2 p.m. with her guests Nnenna Freelon, Mulgrew Miller and Spencer Day.
In recent years, The Grande Dame of Jazz— an aristocratic-sounding title that no doubt makes this modest, democratically minded native of Great Britain cringe — has used Tanglewood as the forum for her relaxed music- and anecdote-packed interviews with Renee Rosnes, Elvis Costello and Diana Krall, and Norah Jones.
Flourishing for nearly 30 years, "Piano Jazz"— the longest-running cultural show on NPR — has featured more than 500 guests. A dizzying array of luminaries, the guest list ranges from Dizzy Gillespie and Cecil Taylor to Alicia Keys and Willie Nelson, including West Hartford piano phenomenon Brad Mehldau.
Electrifying eclectic
Celebrating his new breakthrough release on Blue Note Records, "Invisible Cinema," Parks, an electrifying eclectic, leads his quartet Friday at 6:30 p.m. at Tanglewood's Jazz Café. An informal, cabaret-style venue, the Jazz Café specializes in emerging talent, often including the best and the brightest of the new wave showing promise of having long-lasting impact on the music.
A Seattle native and piano prodigy who was also a math and computer-science wizard, Parks honed his jazz skills during a five-year stint with the great trumpeter/composer Terence Blanchard. After his productive jazz undergrad years with Blanchard, himself a jazz savant, Parks hooked up on tour in a quintet led by a kindred, adventurous, young spirit and fellow rising star, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel.
One bond that McPartland and Parks have in common is the unquenchable desire to keep growing artistically, a need to avoid the status quo, even if that might well be the most commercially and aesthetically secure musical homeland to live in.
McPartland's evolution
As a young World War II war bride, McPartland, who was born in a small village near Windsor Castle, came to the United States with her American husband, Jimmy McPartland, the splendid Chicago-jazz cornet player who swung hard in a traditional, pre-bop style.
Marian was married not only to Jimmy, a flamboyant, hard-drinking, bigger-than-life, charismatic character, but also to Jimmy's brand of music.
Although ebullient and full of life, the old conventions that Jimmy and his pals grooved on so eloquently were already being eclipsed by the 1940s revolution of modern jazz. Specifically by the then seeming anarchy of the emerging avant garde called bebop, led by such upstart iconoclasts and usurpers of the world order as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.
Despite her domestic ties, which would seem to wed her to traditional music for life, McPartland, always a free spirit, instead embraced modernism, engaging in a passionate extramarital musical affair with bebop.
Simultaneously, and in her distinctively subtle, courageous way, the young, smart Brit with a classically trained, pellucid keyboard touch, was also smashing sexist barriers in America, becoming a role model for the generations of great women musicians who would follow in her groundbreaking footprints.
On McPartland's new studio release "Twilight World," her 21st album recorded for Concord Jazz, she revels in her wide-ranging taste, interpreting works by a disparate array of composers ranging from Ornette Coleman to Burt Bacharach. There's a salute to Bill Evans whose lush harmonic sense McPartland, a tonal painter, loved as much as Ellington's rich palette and the colorations of numerous early classical favorites, including Delius and Debussy.
Cinematic soundscapes
In Parks' cinematic works — pieces in which the listener's imagination is inspired to write the screenplay — the probing pianist/composer is today's "candidate for change," just as McPartland, with her gradual progressivism and advocacy for new talent, has been for decades.
While tapping into the epic sweep of the jazz tradition, Parks is also immersed in and quite happily influenced by contemporary pop sounds, the music of his time.
So besides Evans, Tyner, Jarrett, Hancock, Corea and a host of influential jazz keyboard titans, his ears and mind are also wide open to virtually anything else out there that might challenge convention. Tuned in to the wavelengths of Radiohead and digging even indie-pop fare from Death Cab for Cutie, he absorbs—for his own creative purposes—anything from Bjork to Zorn.
It's all grist for Parks' creative mill, which grinds exceedingly fine fresh material.
Under the aegis of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Tanglewood, New England's classic Labor Day weekend jazz bash, marks the official end of the summer jazz festival season.
Bedsides McPartland and Parks, fare ranges from pianist/composer Eliane Elias' fine tribute to Bill Evans in her brainy but heartfelt, "Something for You," to Terence Blanchard's masterful, moving lament for New Orleans, "A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina)"
Here's the lineup, with events in Ozawa Hall, unless otherwise noted:
FRIDAY
6:30 p.m. Aaron Parks Quartet, Jazz Café
8 p.m. Edmar Castaneda Trio with special guest, vibist Joe Locke, and Eliane Elias' homage to Evans
SATURDAY
12:30 p.m. Kate McGarry Trio, an exciting, unconventional singer on a roll, currently stomping and stumping on the Obama bandwagon with her rousing, battle hymn version of Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin' "
2 p.m. Taping of McPartland's "Piano Jazz"
6:30 p.m. Jason Palmer Quintet, Jazz Café
8 p.m. Donal Fox: Scarlatti Jazz Suite Project with special guests Christian Scott and diva Dianne Reeves
SUNDAY
12:30 p.m. Spencer Day Quartet, Jazz Cafe
2 p.m. Clarinet King Eddie Daniels' quartet and Violin Viceroy Mark O'Connor's "Hot Swing" with special guest Jane Monheit making her Tanglewood debut.
6:30 p.m. Alex Brown Trio, Jazz Café
8 p.m. Terence Blanchard's requiem for Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, with a 34-piece orchestra. Blanchard's spiritual elegy for his hometown is not only the festival's grand finale, but also a resounding amen marking the conclusion of the summer's jazz festivities.
Information:
www.tanglewoodjazzfestival.org. Tickets: 888-266-1200 and
www.tanglewood.org.
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