by Dan Lehner
Audiences at the Newport Jazz Festival are frequently given opportunities to see how radically different a single format can be. For the audiences of the Quad Stage on Sunday morning, it was the vast possibilities of the sextet/septet format, as demonstrated by The Cookers and the Vijay Iyer Sextet. Both groups were fronted by saxophones and trumpets and backed by rhythm sections, but each used their cast of players in distinct ways.
The Cookers were a road map of the history of swinging music: any one of the seven, be it trumpeters David Weiss or Eddie Henderson, saxophonists Billy Harper or Donald Harrison, drummer Billy Hart, bassist Cecil McBee or pianist George Cables, could be found somewhere in the legacy of jazz music from the 60’s to the present day. Right out of the gate on their opener, Harper’s “Capra Black”, they moved from an Africa/brass spirited opening right into Harper’s untamed but soulful blowing and Weiss’ weighty, laid back but precise trumpet soloing. Though the group was powerful in their more searching melodies (like McBee’s “Peace Maker"), the group really shone when they focused on their namesake: mid-to-up tempo swingin’ hard bop. Harper’s “Croquet Ballet”, a big, easily swung number written for trumpeter Lee Morgan, gave the group a rhythm to really ride on and a chance for Harrison to construct a perfectly arced and kinetically exhilarating solo.
Vijay Iyer’s sextet, though clearly taking part of the “large small group” jazz tradition of The Cookers, went in a very different direction. Much like McBee’s tune, they opened their set with a color-shifting horn chorale that was lush but unpredictable, but then launched into an irregularly sloped composition with Iyer’s trademark synthesis of rhythms. Though comprised of his usual rhythm section mates (bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore) Iyer’s sextet was thankfully not just “the Vijay Iyer Trio plus horns” and he used his horns to the group’s advantage. Saxophonists Steve Lehman and Mark Shim were at home in Iyer’s usual wheelhouse, where their razor-precise nodes of post-post-bop soloing dug its way into Iyer’s usual dense pulses, but Iyer clearly made musical inroads for trumpeter Graham Haynes, presenting a mostly modern, J-Dilla-esque sense of wicked hip-hop (with some dub later in the set) for Haynes to play his Burnt Sugar–style fusion.
The Mingus Big Band play nearly every Monday at the Jazz Standard in New York, and are keepers of a music that deserves to be heard as often as possible. The band took up the Herculean task of presenting the widest array of Charles Mingus’s music possible during their set, most notably with “Children’s Hour of Dreams”, a knotty and turbulent selection from Mingus’s epic “Epitaph”, once described by a performer as “difficult as Stockhausen…except you don’t have to swing Stockhausen”. The band also took from the more popular selections of Mingus’s work such as “E’s Flat, Ah’s Flat, Too” and the famous protest-song-turned-standard “Fables of Faubus”, featuring vocalist/trombonist Frank Lacy bellowing the defiant lyrics, occasionally inserting contemporary controversial figures like Israel and Hamas. Not to shirk their fine individual personnel, the set also made room for solos by the effervescent Ronnie Cuber on baritone sax and the impossibly precise Conrad Herwig on trombone.
In contrast to the symphonic might of the Mingus band, bassist Ron Carter’s trio was startlingly peaceful and poetic. The drummer-less trio, featuring Russell Malone on guitar and Donald Vega on piano, felt like a three-person version of the famous guitar-piano duos of artists like pianist Bill Evans and guitarist Jim Hall, the time and pulse being provided in alternating focus between each member. Not coincidentally, the recently late guitarist (who had graced Newport just a year ago) was among many past masters honored by the trio, particularly in a guitar feature by Malone that captured Hall’s sense of beauty through economy.
Danilo Perez’s Panama 500 was a great cross-section of what the pianist is known best for, functioning as a unique concoction of Central American rhythms, 20th century classical harmonies and improvisation. Akin to his work in the groundbreaking Wayne Shorter Quartet (who played at NJF 2013), Panama 500’s melodies and arrangements were not readily accessible; they revealed themselves in logic more and more as the tunes went on (though Perez’s compositions were far more through composed than the WSQ). The friction, however, was worth it: the tussles between the consonant and the dissonant giving way to cohesion.
Bobby McFerrin’s spirityouall, as the name suggests, was comprised of different American spirituals, but McFerrin’s band was not simply a gospel group. Spirityouall, which boasts a variety of vocalists, guitarists, pianists, accordionists, etc. as part of its roster, filtered each Black American spiritual and folk song in a few different lenses of North American music like country and calypso, sometimes simultaneously. McFerrin exhibited that he is still one of the foremost vocal improvisers alive today, augmenting his renditions of tunes like “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” with chest percussion and harmonically adventurous scat soloing. McFerrin’s group was a fitting closer to the rainy NJF 2014: as he crooned out “Wade in the Water”, the audience was doing just that, walking through a mist of light rain that permeated most of the afternoon, smiling as they went.