RVAJazz Week in Review

This week was an eventful one for music, both in Richmond and all over. The Richmond Folk Festival took over the city while the Monk competition winner was crowned in D.C. VCU’s ensembles put on an impressive show, and the Interwebs are dominated by streaming unreleased music and provocative essays.

October 13, 2009; 10:07 AM • by Dean Christesen

This week was an eventful one for music, both in Richmond and all over. The Richmond Folk Festival took over the city while the Monk competition winner was crowned in D.C. VCU’s ensembles put on an impressive show, and the Interwebs are dominated by streaming unreleased music and provocative essays.

The 2009 Richmond Folk Festival is still at the top of many people’s minds, mostly because it happily consumed our entire weekend. The line-up of musicians was an impressive array of international musics. Taking the cake for being the talk of the festival were Indian slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya and his tabla playing brother Subashish; roots blues guitarist, resident of Charlottesville, and 2007 MacArthur Fellowship recipient Corey Harris and harmonicist Phil Wiggins; and Tuvan ensemble Khogzhumchu. It was nearly impossible to catch every performer, so if you had any favorites, list them in the comments. Richmond stalwarts No BS! Brass made the front page of the RTD on Sunday for their Gerloff/Parch Memorial March. RVANews has a great photo round-up of the festival.

VCU’s Jazz Orchestra I, Jazz Orchestra II, and the VCU Faculty Septet performed a festival of their own on Thursday evening with guest trombonist Matt Neiss. Both big-bands were in strong form, even JOII with their mellowed low brass section of two trombones and two French horns. Before performing Oliver Nelson’s “Yearnin’,” JOII’s director Taylor Barnett announced that their November concert will be Nelson’s own big-band arrangements of his album Blues and the Abstract Truth in its entirety. Big Oliver Nelson fan here. Expect to see something here about this later.

NPR and WBGO today launched the Exclusive First Listen for saxophonist Miguel Zenon’s yet-to-be-released album Esta Plena. Josh Jackson has insightful background about the album, which is based largely on the Puerto Rican folk music plena. He concludes, “[O]n Esta Plena, [Zenon] may have stumbled upon the Rosetta Stone for modern jazz: a distinct, bilingual and personal stream of notated language.” Check it out for yourself. It’s making for a perfect personal soundtrack for me this morning.

The Thelonious Monk Competition took place this weekend in Washington, D.C., and crowned Ben Williams as the winner. Each year, the competition focuses on a different instrument, and this year it was for the bass. In the first round, each of the 15 contestants played for 12 minutes in front of a panel. The members of the panel included (get ready for this): Charlie Haden, Dave Holland, Bob Hurst, Christian McBride, and John Patitucci. NYTimes ArtsBeat and Jazzblog.ca have more info. Some VCU students came back with stories of meeting Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Holland, Chris Potter, Jason Moran, et al, and made us all really jealous.

Jason Crane has an essay over at PopDose that articulates what many young jazz aficionados feel today about jazz. It’s called Jazz Don’t Hurt: What is Jazz, Anyway?, and evaluates the terms “blues, swing, and improvisation” and their pitfalls when applying them to jazz of today, or Jazz Now, if you will. He brings up many good points, such as the danger of pigeonholing great music because it does not fall into a distinguishable category. Would you call Zenon’s new album “jazz” or the reprehensible title “world music”? Many of us would the former, and our responses to anyone who has a problem with that would be similar to one another: So what?

Anything else exciting that I missed?

October 13, 2009 10:07 AM 2