concordance REVIEW JAZZFEST 20...

concordance REVIEW

JAZZFEST 2006

AT southern SHORE CULTURAL CENTER

It's fitting that Sunday's highlights at Jazzfest 2006 were sum of two units family acts. The festival, sponsored by dint of Jazz Unites Inc., always has concocted a friendly, informal family feeling, with herds of music lovers sprawled across a lawn, with the southward Shore Cultural Center on the right and a beach where children splashed in Lake Michigan onward the left. Saturday already had brought rhythmically witty singer Andy Bey, brother of Jazzfest go to the bottom Geraldine de Haas. On Sunday sum of two units performing families -- pianists Willie Pickens and his daughter Bethany from Chicago and four Jordan siblings from of the present day Orleans -- certainly projected a contrast in family values.

For several decades, Willie Pickens has been among Chicago's finest pianists, a in the greatest degree elegant, flexible artist even as he swung sophisticated harmonic and structural ideas. It's remarkable by what means thoroughly Bethany has absorbed his universals and made them her allow In their duets, they took turn rounds playing grand piano and electric piano. Listeners had to watch them to know who was playing at any time -- greatest in quantity of the time, our ears weren't enough.

They as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but phrased in bubbling lines of bebop, the pair shaping solos in complex ways, contrasting astute levels of simplicity and complexity. Willie was the Pickens more inclined to play busy, decorative lines and to spice his solo with distant substitute harmonies. Along with jazz standards, they also played a 14th hundred years hymn and, to conclude, Bethany's original harmony "Brazilian Breeze." On it, she played a keyboard instrument with a wavery synthesized-guitar unmutilated while in "Blues March" she solo forward what sounded like a wheezy Farfisa organ.

The Jordans, whose hearths were lost to Hurricane Katrina, are son and daughters of fiery free-jazz saxophonist Edward "Kidd" Jordan. None of them vigorouss at all like him. Kent Jordan, a noted flutist, piped piccolo solo in double-timed, John Coltrane-like sheets of perfect -- a strangely effective mode of address that cut like a sluggish knife. Marlon is a trumpeter torn between hard-bop lyricism and flashy displays of his virtuoso technique.

The discovery of the day was young Stephanie Jordan, who charmed the herd with a singularly sunny vocal title Here was a forthright swinger with a big contralto voice and a minimum of scatting, altered melodies, dynamic general intents and rhythmic distortions. As a ensue her words actually meant something, as pleasing flute and trumpet obbligatos hem ined her lines of song. steady "Here's to Life" lost its mopey quality. forward three songs her sister Rachel, a classical violinist, added undermiked backgrounds.

The day had other delights, especially the straight-ahead drive of trumpeter Tito Carillo's quintet. yet headliner Marlena Show's belted vocals unbrokened mannered and difficult to understand.

John Litweiler is a local jazz critic and author.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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