A Feast For All - by Emilie Pons
Windy City native Abbey Lincoln, Chicago musicians Nick Moss and the Fliptops and Gerry Hundt just had a series of extraordinary gigs at the Montreal's International Jazz Festival. Abbey Lincoln, who now lives in New York City, sang at the Theatre Maisonneuve while Nick Moss and the Fliptops and Gerry Hundt were featured in the outdoors program.
Now 77 years old, Abbey Lincoln moved an entire audience with her breathtaking voice. Once married to Max Roach, Ms. Lincoln was very happy to have been invited to the jazz festival this year, she confessed to Alain Brunet during an interview with the Montreal daily newspaper La Press.
Lincoln performed with pianist Rodney Kendrick, drummer Jaz Sawyer (Sawyer was born in San Francisco and began playing drums at age 2) and bass player Michael Bowie. Those musicians, very attentive to the singer, enabled the show to be a most special one and Lincoln's voice, her overall tone, made the public shiver.
It all started in 1979, and now Montreal is the most important jazz festival in the world. As Howard Reich, from the Chicago Tribune, mentions it, Montreal is "the biggest and best jazz festival on the planet." But it is not only a jazz festival: it is essentially a music festival. This year, it boasted 725 shows.
From rock to hip hop (with Public Enemy), to dub (with Lee Scratch Perry and the Wailers), to African music (with artists such as Salif Keita and Vieux Farka Toure and Mory Kante in the griot tradition who played for the closing concert), to the jazz rock (with Chick Corea and Return to Forever), to modern jazz (with the Zenon Quartet), to Cuban sounds (with Grupo Fantasma) and jazz staples (with Dave Brubeck as well as the Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey orchestras), artists from all over the globe were present this year at the Montreal 29th jazz festival. The Bjorkestra and the world famous singer Leonard Cohen, who was back on stage after fifteen years of absense, also startled the audience.
Young and up-and-coming musicians and jazz elders alike gave rousing performances. British band Empirical, a recent revelation, Christian Scoot, and Yaron Herman showed that the future of the music is in good hands while McCoy Tyner, Oliver Jones, and Hank Jones proved that they still have important statements to make.
Some people may wonder why the Montreal festival seems to defy the definition of a jazz festival; but the larger and the more diverse the audience the bigger the chances of enabling people to discover jazz. For some, the Montreal festival offers "a refreshing broad definition of jazz" (Entertainment Weekly).
According to the Israeli pianist Yaron Herman, who is now based in Paris, what matters is to "transmit emotions." For him, "music should first touch the heart." This is definitely what the Montreal jazz festival, one more time, managed to do this year, with, among others, some of the most talented Chicago musicians.
PRODIGIES CHARM MONTREAL
They are between 14 and 26 years old and they mesmerized a vast audience June 26-July 6: from Nikki Yanofsky to Christian Scott, some Canadian, European, American, or Israeli prodigies performed at the latest edition of Montreal Intenational Jazz Festival. Music, for them, is like breathing.
Fourteen-year-old Montrealer Nikki Yanofsky, already present at the 2006 festival, opened the event and shook the audience one more time with her very peculiar voice while 25-year-old trumpet player Jay Phelps, from Vancouver, came to play with his British band Empirical: his musicians are not older than him but all sound already quite confident.
For Phelps, playing in Montreal this year was a real opportunity to position himself at a more international level, to accomplish more. "I loved it," he claimed. But after his outdoor concert, he added that he would have preferred to play inside, because thay way he can "hear his trumpet." He prefers to "play acoustic" and doesn't like to "depend on a microphone."
For Shaney Forbes, Empirical's drummer, "the British jazz scene is extremely young and the standards are very high." He added that in Europe, jazz comes more from Classical music than in the US. But for him, musicians are equally talented in Europe and in America; of course the US is a country which, overall, has been of primary importance for jazz. "Jazz chose me," Forbes added. "I like expressing myself," he said, and he discovered, with jazz, a "better way" to express himself.
"Getting consistent work so you can pay your rent" is one of the challenges when being a young musician, explained Nathaniel Facey, Empirical's saxophone player. For him, jazz "challenges you to be creative, honest and focused. It is a means of expressing one's innermost thoughts, feelings, and emotions using a given stimulus." But he also thinks that "jazz is not big enough and needs to grow everywhere."
With his sextet, Christian Scott, aged 24, played some of his last album's tunes at the Gesu, where the Israeli pianist Yaron Herman, now based in Paris, astonished the audience on the very first Saturday of the festivsl with what proved to be one of the most remarkable shows of the entire festival. Now 26, Herman started thinking about music at age 16. When asked whether he handles his success well, the pianist answers that he "does not even think about it." All he knows is that he has a "mission," and the question "what does it mean to be a young jazz musician nowadays" sounds irrelevant to him: "I have a duty towards myself. I have a mission to accomplish, a job to do on a daily basis, and that's all. Being young or old doesn't matter, really; what counts is my mission, my daily mission."
Surely enough, the Montreal Jazz Festival would not have been as impressive without the presence of all those young spirits, including the American singer Melody Gardot, another prodigy, hardly 23 years old, who was invited to one of the festival's closing concerts, and not the least since the event celebrated the 25th anniversary of the creation of the respected Justin Time label.
- EMILIE PONS