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Just to list all of the great groups I heard at the JEN (Jazz Education Network) conference in New Orleans is mind-boggling. One of the themes was women in jazz so I heard Sarah Coswell, and SAGE, the initials of a quartet of individually top-notch players. I heard impressive middle school kids from the Tucson Jazz Institute and from the Jane Addams Middle School in Seattle. I heard the Shake Em Up jazz band led by Marla Dixon (trumpet) with Chloe Feoranzo (clarinet), and the Bria Skonberg (trumpet) quartet with Roxy Coss on sax. She led the New York City Hot Jazz Camp I attended 2 years ago.
I heard the Brubeck Brothers who don't often play together in a fantastic concert honoring their father (100th anniversary of his birth). A surprising and delightful concert was given by Simon Rowe, formerly head of the Brubeck Institute, now director of the San Francisco Jazz Conservatory, He and his outstanding faculty (for this year) from the conservatory played Brubeck tunes -- Chad Lefkowitz is now my favorite tenor sax player, and Matt Wilson is my favorite drummer as well as a friend. An improvised chamber music group from Montreal led by Jean-Michel Pilc gave an interesting take on free jazz: a group that just plays without reference to any music, key, or plan. The festival ended as it began three years ago with the Preservation Hall Legacy Band, members of which are related to original Preservation Hall players -- My hero Louis Ford played clarinet beautifully again this time surprising us with a solo of Georgia Cabin by Sidney bechet, a tune I didn't know. Louis introduced Charlie Gabriel, helped up the steps to the stage to show us that he can swing and honk at 87.
Saturday I made my way to Frenchmen Street (northeast of the French Quarter beyond the Jazz Museum in the old Mint) where I visited The Spotted Cat, Bamboula’s, Snug Harbor, the Royal Hotel, D.B.A., and the Three Muses. I heard the Hot Club of New Orleans, G and The Swinging Gypsies (a fusion Django/pop group), Chance Bushman, who sings and tap dances leading the Ibervillionaires, and Marla again with the Shotgun jazz band, which revived In the Gloaming for me. So many great players and I have so little ability to praise them all adequately. All of these players can be heard on YouTube.
At the conference I heard inspiring presentations by scholars from around the world. A theme of “less is more” (concerning improvization) came through everything I heard. My friend and teacher Evan Christopher says on the one hand that a clarinet player can’t play too many notes, but also that the groove comes first from clapping and stepping. Street bands of people without musical training, playing two notes are the beginning of jazz. (I have heard such bands in New Orleans!) An analysis of Louis Armstrong’s solos reveals that he surprisingly played mostly 1-3-5's with few 7ths. Notes in the margins of Ellington’s scores say things like “Jazz is freedom of expression.” Pilc spoke of taking music off the paper and into life.
I want to think a lot more deeply about issues of race in America. In New Orleans I realized that race is more basically the history of slavery, our destruction of native cultures, reconstruction, Jim crow, segregation, up to and including Black Lives Matter as a be response to our systemic practice of policing and imprisonment, housing and other segregated practices. In the North I think Whites view Blacks without much awareness or understanding of the impact of the slavery tradition. I was struck by the renovated old bank and business buildings in NO. I was staying in an apartment building that had been a "homestead savings bank." Many hotels in the Central Business District had the names of such old institutions including "the cotton exchange." I realized that a person of color would not have been allowed in these places except to clean them. Today there is significant "race mixing" but with some omnipresent tension, ameliorated by black and white working well together for some, and by conscious expressions of respect by whites and blacks both to maintain peace and to make it. The presence of native street names and the preservation of memories of native tribes in rituals related to Mardi gras are reminders of how and why those people's are mostly gone. There is a good reason why our race problems are called “America’s original sin.”
