Variety has been essential to the spirit of the Chicago Jazz Festival ever since the first one 12 years ago. Chicago’s festival is a smorgasbord of music, and the quality of the music has remained high indeed. This quality is largely due to the festival’s seeking out of original musicians–players and composers who create from that most primal of artistic motivations, need. “Express yourself,” Von Freeman likes to tell other musicians, and those words are close to the essence of jazz, with emphasis on “yourself.”
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This year the Chicago Jazz Festival featured a fair number of long-experienced, even original musicians, as opposed to young ones who’ve revived older jazz idioms. From the swing era came tenor saxman Eddie Johnson, violinist Johnny Frigo–both Chicago veterans–and the irresistibly rocking pianist Jay McShann, who once led the last of the great Kansas City bands. McShann also sang in an uncanny imitation of nasal bluesman Walter Brown, vocalist in McShann’s early 40s bands; blues violinist Claude Williams, who long ago was Count Basie’s first guitarist, and bass great Milt Hinton shared equal solo space with McShann, while Buddy Tate, though in poor health, roared two up-tempo tenor-sax solos and the ballad “Blue and Sentimental.”
Yet another veteran, alto saxist Lee Konitz, played with three different generations of musicians and sounded different each time. With late-blooming bopper Judy Roberts, he sounded like a swing saxophonist; with Russo, he sounded like a solitary, determined David surrounded by an army of Goliaths–amid Russo’s “progressive jazz,” I don’t believe Konitz played a single double-time phrase. Laurence Hobgood’s trio featured the pianist-leader’s angular harmonies and broken rhythms and Paul Wertico’s modal-oriented drumming, which clashed severely with Konitz’s native simplicity of phrasing. Konitz’s response was an elated freedom with chord changes, while engaging Wertico, then Dan Anderson (on tuba, not his customary bass) in duets–strange to hear, and perhaps a failure, but the kind that illuminates.
And then came George Gruntz’s hour-long Chicago Cantata, a three-ring circus, wild, crazy, and exhilarating. This mad spectacle included Von Freeman and Mwata Bowden in a tenor-sax duel and, even better, those uninhibited rowdies Lester Bowie (trumpet) and Ray Anderson (trombone) dueling; Howard Johnson played a grunting, throbbing tuba solo and Billy Branch played some hysterical harmonica; Sunnyland Slim played some sober piano choruses, utterly impervious to all the lunacy around him; most of all, as a unifying element, there was blues, blues, blues. Gruntz has made a career out of choosing good soloists and composing settings that stay out of their way; this work was no exception. He seemed to have chosen his Chicago players for their extroversion and idiosyncrasies at least as much as for their originality, which made Chicago Cantata a perfect piece for a huge crowd at an outdoor festival.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Marc PoKempner.
