Portland Jazz Festival Report

The Portland Jazz Festival ends on Sunday, but the main events took place last weekend. Here are samples of my impressions, from a long review for Jazz Times.

McCoy Tyner’s trio with bassist Charnett Moffett and drummer Eric Gravatt played the opening concert. Before a capacity audience in the gargantuan grand ballroom of the Portland Hilton, Tyner pulled out the stops, meaning that on a dynamic scale of 10, he kept the music between 8.5 and 10. A monster sound system, suited to a rock concert in a stadium, grossly over amplified Moffett’s bass so that Gravatt had no choice but to compensate with full drum power. What could Tyner do but lean into the piano with all of his considerable strength, exaggerating his natural tendencies.

On Dee Dee Bridgewater:

The one American song was Neal Hefti’s “Girl Talk.” Bridgewater announced it as strictly for the women in the audience. She sang it in French, then English. As it progressed, she morphed from sophisticated Parisienne into a Della Reese/Pearl Bailey persona and converted the song into a sketch about picking up a man in a bar, taking him home to bed, then dismissing him without their ever learning one another’s names. If that sounds earthy and outrageous, it was, explicitly so, with illustrative body language. It was ”just between us girls” and it was very funny.

On Bill Frisell:

Scherr and Roberts, the cellist, began a series of unison chromatic lines leading into another segue transition. Suddenly Frisell’s guitar was in solo on a peaceful melody as the strings made a transition from free playing to a folk melody. Behind them, Scherr raised the intensity with an arco solo, then the activity decreased back toward peacefulness, but it was a more troubling peace, a dissonant, polytonal, Schoenbergian peace that didn’t end but melded into Frisell playing heavy guitar over a slow, insistent waltz beat.

To read the whole thing, go to the JazzTimes website.

Have a good weekend.