It's almost time for the Deer Isle Jazz Festival in Stonington, Maine. For eight years, I've helped bring great jazz to this tiny Down East Maine island. In that time, both the fest and I have grown. This year's event is a New Orleans blowout (more on that in my next post). Here's a recent piece I wrote for Jazziz, about my experiences as volunteer producer.

MAINE ATTRACTION

by Larry Blumenfeld

"Condoms. Tampons. Excess hair. SMALL AN-I-MALS!"

So sang the dozen folks forming a circle within a tiny cabin last July, holding that last syllable until Arturo O'Farrill dropped his right hand with a conductor's authority. I'd just made the nine-hour drive from Brooklyn, New York, to Deer Isle, Maine, but my bleary eyes found strength to widen. I laughed.

I'd walked in on a rehearsal for Haystack, The Opera: An Afro-Cuban Jazz Odyssey -- and it was no joke. O'Farrill's wife, Alison, sat at a keyboard, his eldest son, Zack, before a set of conga drums. His youngest, Adam, held a trumpet, awaiting his cue. Soon various rhythm instruments -- hand drums, cowbells, guiros, clavés -- were handed out.

Before long, O'Farrill had these painters and potters and sculptors, all of whom had come to the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts for a summer session, creating four layers of rhythm and sounding pretty damn in-sync.

O'Farrill had come to Maine to headline at the annual Deer Isle Jazz Festival, for which I've been volunteer producer since its inception, in 2001. Each summer, one festival musician serves as artist-in-residence at the Haystack School. O'Farrill, a celebrated pianist and bandleader, the son of a legendary Cuban composer, met this challenge by bringing his whole family and creating an opera, with lyrics drawn from Haystack Director Stuart Kestenbaum's work -- not his celebrated poetry, but his school manual, the part about "what not to flush down the toilet."

It was June, and I'd just moved back to New York for at least a very long stretch. The sting of missing New Orleans was lessened a bit by the arrival of Kidd Jordan: He got a hero's welcome at this year's Vision Festival, which kicked off a fest-filled June in Manhattan.

Here's my Village Voice piece on Kidd, and all the rest of that jazz:

Recapping 2008's Vision and JVC Jazz Festivals

Charles Lloyd, Kidd Jordan, Herbie Hancock and more

By Larry Blumenfeld

Kidd Jordan felt something stir deep down inside. He just had to let it out. That's the way the tenor saxophonist explained it during a Vision Festival pre-concert discussion when poet Kalamu ya Salaam asked, "Why don't you just play more popular music and make more money?"

In New Orleans, where he's lived most of his life, Jordan once played all sorts of commercially viable stuff: seminal 1950s r&b alongside Art and Aaron Neville in the Hawkettes, Broadway scores for touring productions, session work and gigs with everyone from Ray Charles to Aretha Franklin to Stevie Wonder. But he found his sound elsewhere. It's been some 50 years since a friend played him Ornette Coleman's Something Else!!!!, and Jordan has felt emboldened to follow his singular, utterly unfettered path ever since. He's informed by but never derivative of Coleman's free jazz, enamored of his instrument's altissimo overtone range, and still as soulful as when he played r&b. Yet Jordan is revered in his hometown mostly as an educator, in summer camps for kids and as founding director of the Heritage Music School at Southern University. His music isn't heard much there; at this year's Jazz & Heritage Festival, Jordan didn't even perform.

In June, at the 13th annual Vision Festival, this country's premier gathering of avant-garde musicians, Jordan got a true hero's welcome: a full night in his honor, billed as a lifetime-achievement celebration, centered on his music. 

Politics were in the air during jazzfest -- literally. While the Neville Brothers closed the event on the Acura stage, a plane circled above the Fair Grounds towing a banner that read: "Shell, Hear the Music. Fix the Coast You Broke." Not all the commentary was so overt, and none as visible, but it was there if you kept your eyes and ears open. Mind you, it's too easy in New Orleans these days to read meaning and purpose into every lyric or song choice -- was Sheryl Crow making a statement by covering "Gimme Shelter," or was she just doing a Stones tune? -- yet some of the messages were timely, pointed, and worth remembering.

Here's my reflection on all that in a piece for the website Truthdig.

Just when I was feeling guilty about heading into Passover without a thought of my desert-crossing ancestors or my going-without-bread family members, I ran into Ronald Lewis, a sweet-hearted, tough-minded guy who is still among the lonely pioneers who've returned to his Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood. (He was a key character in a piece I did for Salon last year.)

"You comin' to the Seder?" he asked.

"What Seder?"

"The one at my house."

"Huh?"

Turns out LJ Goldstein, photographer, Jew-about-town, founding member of Krewe du Jieux, was holding his krewe's ritual dinner at Lewis's recently restored home. If my culture was on display for a night at Lewis's place, so was his, permanently: When I introduced my wife, Erica, Lewis commanded: "Go see my museum!" -- the House of Dance and Feathers located just behind his home (this is the second edition, and impressive at that, reconstructed after Lewis lost his previous artifacts in the floods).

Some guests had prepared traditional Jewish fare -- kugel and matzoh ball soup and so on. There was brisket, too -- from The Joint, a favorite Bywater barbecue spot. We sat on the floor and worked through two hours of a Passover service far more faithful than my family's version. And different -- the Haggadah, for instance, began with "Shalom, y'all." Helen Regis, scholar of all things second-line, was there, as was Joel Dinnerstein, who is on Tulane Univeristy's faculty. So was Willie Birch, whose paintings, drawings, and mixed-media sculptures tell stories of struggle and transcendence as powerfully as the Haggadah.

"Yeah. I'm doin' a multicultural thing," Lewis joked when Birch showed up. When it came time to give thanks and to reflect, he turned serious. "I'm thankful for being back. But I miss the Ninth Ward like it was. I used to be able to just walk and see everyone and everything where there is still mostly nothing."

From there, as any good Seder does, we traced the tale of enslaved Jews on the run from Egypt, and I thought about how little difference there is between "Let My People Go" and "Let My People Go Home."

Links between basketball and jazz run deep
By Larry Blumenfeld

One striking absurdity of the National Basketball Association is this fact: The team from Utah wears the jerseys emblazoned with "Jazz."

That name originated in New Orleans, of course, where the Jazz played its first five seasons in the late 1970s. Back then, the shirts made fundamental sense -- and not just as a nod to the city's iconic art form.

(read on or click here to link)

My thoughts on how the two subjects intertwine (or not) is expressed in this Village Voice piece:

"It's amazing how much joy and hope these beads and feathers bring."

The Sunday before Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Donald Harrison Jr., Big Chief of the Congo Nation, son of Big Chief Donald Sr., lay on the living-room floor of his mother's house in the Ninth Ward, cutting leopard-print fur in a pattern as he spoke. Nearby, a sofa and chair were covered with beads and rhinestones, along with ostrich and turkey feathers that had been dyed a golden yellow. Harrison was preparing to "mask," to enact the city's least-understood tradition, and these days, perhaps, its most essential: Mardi Gras Indian culture. These rituals, which date to at least the mid-1800s, are an African-American homage to the Native Americans who once sheltered runaway slaves and to the spirit of resistance.

The calendar was pointed in its irony this year: Elsewhere, February 5 marked Super Tuesday....

For the full piece, click here or read on.

When I paid for my latte at New York's JFK airport in November, there he was, looking right at me from the cover of "The Measure of Monk," the latest checkout-counter CD compilation offered by the coffee chain.

Hell, if those folks ordering frappuccinos can learn to say "Crepuscule with Nellie" (track seven on the new CD), I might just learn to say "tall" when I really mean "small," or "venti" for "large." Had this uncoolest of coffee chains suddenly turned hip? Could Monk's dark tone clusters really sell to the masses alongside the biscotti and bittersweet chocolates? As it turns out, yes.