JVC Festival Finishes Up on an Eclectic Note
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The 2008 JVC Jazz Festival finished up this weekend, and the homestretch featured a variety of engaging performers. Wednesday evening’s program showcased two worldly-wise young female instrumentalists: the singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding and multi-reed player Anat Cohen.
The rapidly rising Ms. Spalding is an exuberant player who was born in Colorado, but specializes in Latin-style jazz and sings mostly in Spanish.
Though she has plenty of pop-electronic trappings on her new self-titled album, she played in a more congenial acoustic mode at the Ethical Culture auditorium. Her general approach uses a lot of scatting over Pan-American rhythms, and she was most winning on a Latinized “Body and Soul” along with the film theme “Wild Is the Wind,” on a program of mostly originals.
Ms. Spalding is charismatic and engaging, but the evening clearly belonged to the Tel Aviv-born Ms. Cohen, whose playing and repertoire suggest an approach to tradition that is both contemporary and highly personal. She began with two emblematic tunes from the swing era, Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz” and Ernesto Lecuona’s “Siboney,” which she played with behind-the-beat phrasing in a pentatonic mode and as a wickedly fast samba.
Her original “Washington Square Park” was primarily African in texture, with pianist Jason Lindner making his keyboard sound like the Afro-styled guitar of Lionel Loueke. After a slow ballad treatment of “A Change Is Gonna Come,” her quartet was joined by her two brothers, the trumpeter Avashai Cohen and the soprano saxophonist Yuval Cohen. As a three-horn frontline, the overall sound is similar to the fast blues, marches, and boogaloos of the Jazz Messengers, delivered with the competitive spirit of an Israeli Olympic team.
Things were quite different on Thursday night: If I had to pick 10 words to describe the combination of tenor saxophone star Joshua Redman and the trio Soulive, eight of them would be “loud” — and the remaining two would be “very good.” Soulive, which consists of guitarist Eric Krasno and the Evans brothers Alan (on drums) and Neal (on Hammond B3 organ and other keyboards), combines a ’60s-style organ trio format with a late-’90s jam band approach. The group doesn’t play melodies so much as grunting grooves, sweaty riffs, and extended improvisations with a life of their own; theme-and-variations without a discernible theme. At their best, you get a different kind of a kick from them than a traditional group — even an avant-garde performance generally has a beginning and ending, whereas the jam bands play mostly a lot of middle. Mr. Redman has shown a fondness for electric organ and funk-style settings in the past, though he normally works with a traditional acoustic rhythm section. He fit right in with the trio’s patterns of tension and release, and ecstatic loud climaxes on top of other climaxes.
The show took place at the newly opened nightclub, Le Poisson Rouge, on the site of the old Village Gate (where I spent many hours as a teenager). The place is decked out like a dance club, with no tables or chairs, just a big open area — the only seats were in a reserved area for a few of us old fogies in the press.
Friday night’s show featured a combination worthy of Carnegie Hall: the marvelous singer Dianne Reeves (probably the most commercially and critically successful jazz vocalist of the current era) and the Reverend Al Green, an icon of soul. Ms. Reeves’s opening program was one I’ve heard several times before — and could listen to many times more without tiring of it — a mixture of familiar bossa novas (“Chega De Saudade,” “Once I Loved”), jazz standards (“A Child Is Born,” “Social Call”) and a climactic expansion of the Motown classic “Just My Imagination,” into a well-woven autobiographical narrative. She sings lyrics beautifully, yet she is one of the few living vocalists whose scatting is worth listening to for multiple choruses. Perhaps mindful that she was about to be followed by a Holy Man, her hour-long set reached its peak with two spiritual pieces, the traditional “If I Can Help Somebody” and a new inspirational original song called “Good Day” (itself inspired by “Ain’t That Good News?”).
Where Ms. Reeves is a secular performer with a spiritual side, the Reverend Al Green is a man of the cloth whose religion is equal parts Apollo Theater and Gospel Tabernacle. In both of those traditions (as opposed to the concert hall), the main focus is to engage the audience by means of oration and continual interplay. On Friday the singing often seemed secondary to the talking (if not quite sermonizing). He continually shifted gears between his dozens of hits (including “Tired of Being Alone” and “Let’s Stay Together”) and religious material. “The Reverend,” as he referred to himself (in the third person) is a dynamic, engaging performer of the kind that you won’t find elsewhere, whether singing of his love for “Baby” or of the Lord.
Profanity aside, rap music has roots related to the tradition of oratory based in black churches. On Saturday night at Carnegie Hall, hip-hop star Mos Def gave a performance that was inspirational and celebratory. The evening began with a clip of radio host Petey Greene explaining the proper ways to serve and consume watermelon. This led a procession of horn and rhythm players in watermelon T-shirts and Pullman Porter caps, as well as a string section of 12 young ladies, who jointly made up what the star identified as “Amino Alkaline: Watermelon Syndicate.”
Although nearly all rap records employ a background of beat-boxes and drum machines, Mos Def is a highly sonorous performer on the occasions when I’ve heard him in acoustic horn settings. Here he delivered his orations over an exquisite background of big-band brass, reeds, and strings, and it fit surprisingly well together. He spoke of Barack Obama, as well as John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Eric Dolphy, the latter while projecting an image of the superhero Iron Man, in an astute reference to Dolphy’s 1963 composition “Iron Man.”
He was joined by a female singer (dressed like Judy Garland in a men’s suit jacket and fedora) who sang the Eurythmics hit, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” and also played host to the pioneer proto-rapper Gil Scott-Heron. Still, the main focus of the evening was hearing Mos Def do what he does in an ingeniously orchestrated (possibly by pianist and credited musical director Robert Glasper) big band and strings context, which made rap seem, for the first time, like music to my ears.
I can’t claim to have understood more than a few words that he said during the actual performance, but I felt like I got it just the same. It was a fitting way to finish off an eclectic jazz festival year.