Sunday, June 26, 2005

Jazz Festival, part 6: Saturday in the park

On Saturday, I did make it down to Shaw Park to see the Dave Douglas Quintet, and though the late afternoon heat was oppressive, it was definitely worth the trip.

Entering the Jazz Festival site, I managed to catch the last number by the Carolbeth True Trio, the first act of the afternoon. They were swinging hard and sounding crisp, and got a nice hand from the smallish group - a few dozen at most - watching their performance.

I'm not much good at estimating crowd sizes, but at this point, it looked like there were two to three hundred people settled in front of the stage to watch Dave Douglas, with a few hundred more milling about the grounds. The crowd did grow steadily throughout Douglas' set, but I couldn't help but wonder how many more people would have turned out if the temperatures had been ten degrees cooler.

Despite the less-than-ideal weather conditions, I really enjoyed the Quintet's performance. As Douglas suggested in my interview with him, their music is an exploration of a road not taken, a place where the infusion of electric instruments into jazz didn't inevitably lead to the twin dead ends of chops-obsessed fusion and the manicured funk of smooth jazz. With its seamless integration of composition and improvisation, use of extended forms, and the signature presence of the Rhodes piano (played with consummate skill on Saturday by David Berkman), Douglas' Quintet music has frequently been compared to Miles Davis' work just before Bitches Brew. It's a valid comparison, but as Douglas pointed out, there are plenty of other reference points from the same era, too.

Regardless, Douglas himself sounds nothing like Miles. His tone is brighter, and though he can be terse at times, he generally seems to favor longer, more elaborate lines than Miles did in a similar context. On the closer "Seventeen," Douglas even manifested some flurries that recalled Don Cherry. Tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin was somewhat undermiked for most of the show, but revealed a fine technique and compelling imagination when he was fully audible.

McCaslin showed a Shorter-like elusiveness in a few passages, but was positively extroverted in others, blowing with conviction stoked by the rhythm team of James Genus on bass and Clarence Penn on drums. I especially enjoyed Penn, a smiling, energetic and charismatic presence who distributes the beat over his entire kit, relying as much on space and color as on sheer force. Penn has clearly absorbed the work of Tony Williams and Elvin Jones, but to my ears, there were also bits reminiscent of Billy Hart, Jack DeJohnette and even Billy Higgins, on Douglas' composition "Skeeterism," a quick-changing musical landscape inspired by the energetic antics of his son at age seven.

It was complex music, the kind that demands (and rewards) a listeners' full attention, and though the languid, almost hallucinatory quality of some sections seemed somehow appropriate in the sweltering heat, all five musicians managed to keep the energy level up throughout the performance. The set list included "Strange Liberation," "A Single Sky," "Just Save This" and "Skeeterism" - all announced from the stage by Douglas - and finished with two long pieces identified after the show by McCaslin as "Culture Wars" and "Seventeen." All had enough twists and turns to merit repeat listening, and I look forward to getting a couple of the Quintet's CDs so I can compare my memory of the concert performances to the recorded versions. There was a lot of musical substance there, and the Festival organizers deserve kudos for including the Dave Douglas Quintet in this year's lineup.

By the time Douglas finished at 6 p.m., a lot more people had entered the Festival grounds, with a steady stream still on their way in. However, I'd be very surprised if this year's attendance matches the totals from last year. I plan to call Festival executive director Cynthia Prost this week to get her take on how the event went, and I'll post any information gleaned from that conversation, as well as any other post-Festival reports I can find, right here.

Update: Calvin Wilson's review of Saturday's Fest-ivities, written for the Post-Dispatch, is now online here.

2 comments:

St. Louis Oracle said...

One glaring omission from the festival was merchandise. I like to wear St Louis gear when traveling to vacation spots, and I was hoping to buy a t-shirt or visor to plug St Louis jazz. The published festival map showed a "festival store," but when I went there Friday night, they had nothing and didn't even know they were supposed to be a "festival store." One volunteer blamed losing Smooth Jazz 106 as a sponsor (due to format change), but that seems to be a pretty lame excuse. Wouldn't the festival make a profit on merchandise on its own, not to mention the long-range benefit of having vacationers in Nantucket, Key West, New Orleans and other venues see references to the St Louis Jazz Festival?

Dean Minderman said...

That does seem like an unfortunate omission, Oracle. Attractive merchandise can indeed help spread the word about an event, and if managed properly can even bring some dollars to the bottom line.

(That last part is easier said than done, though - I know of a couple people reported to still have boxes of old, unsellable Blues Festival t-shirts in their basements.)

In my experience, the Festival staff has generally been well-organized and professional, so I'm surprised they would overlook something seemingly as basic as this. I'll ask Cynthia Prost about it when I talk to her.