June 27 - July 4, 1 9 9 6

Small world

Boston's premiere jazz fest loses its juice

by Jon Garelick

Maybe Boston will never have a jazz festival on the scale of other major (and not so major) North American cities like New York, Montreal, New Orleans, and San Francisco. In Montreal, where the Canadian government gets in on the act, the festival is an internationally promoted citywide event. And now, in New York, the upstart Knitting Factory "What Is Jazz?" Festival, with new corporate sponsorship from Heineken, is threatening George Wein and his JVC fest. Meanwhile, the Boston Globe Jazz Festival (now the Globe Jazz and Blues Festival), which has sputtered intermittently since 1966, this year reached an anemic low -- a "transition year," as it was characterized in that newspaper.

Well, let's hope it's a transition up and not out. The Globe booted long-time jazz festival specialist Wein (the creator of the Newport festivals) in favor of non-jazz specialists the Don Law Co. The reasoning was simple enough: Law could offer Harborlights, and the Globe could more or less limit its financial risk to advertising. The result: last year we got six events with 19 acts (21 if you count the April "preview" of the festival with the Count Basie Orchestra and the Kenny Hadley Big Band). This year, we got 12 acts in five events. Last year the heart of the festival was the five free concerts at Copley and Harvard Square. The heart of the festival this year -- well, it didn't really have a heart, unless you count Tito Puente's appearance at the traditional free show at the Hatch Shell (a bill that also included the Count Basie Orchestra and Gato Barbieri). Otherwise, former Tower of Power saxophonist Richard Eliot played a free show at Copley Square, and everything else was a top-dollar Harborlights event: Al Green with local soul-gospel man Larry Watson, Robert Cray, Maceo Parker, Luther Allison. The festival signed off with mostly jazz on Sunday night: Chick Corea's "Remembering Bud Powell" supergroup, Kenny Hadley's Big Band, and, oh well, Spyro Gyra. Hadley and Watson were all that remained of the local roster.

So what was the "news" here, if any? Al Green, probably the finest soul singer alive, would be noteworthy in any festival, especially since no one can remember the last time he played Boston. At the Harborlights show on Tuesday, Green's entrance was ecstatic. He lead his 12-piece band with leaps and falsetto wails. He fell to his knees and cried for mercy. He rolled back the sleeves of his dark suit over his white shirt and waved his arms at the crowd. He laughed maniacally. And yet, aside from the thrill of seeing Al Green, his show was a tease. When the crowd joined in on his hits, he dropped out, content to lead his congregation. (Green is a minister at his own church in Memphis, having turned to religion after his string of '70s hits.) He even conducted an "Amazing Grace."

And the hits were the high points: "Let's Stay Together," "Can't Get Next to You," "Still in Love with You," "Love and Happiness," "Take Me to the River." With Green, ecstasy and hysteria seem inseparable. "I can make it rain when I want to/I can make a ship sail on dry land . . . But I can't get next to you." On "Take Me to the River," he let out a particularly devilish laugh. His band was Memphis-smooth, with a fine horn section. But Green was also bedeviled by a faulty mix and a mike that kept dropping out, and in less than an hour it was over.

Sunday night's show was the other big jazz night of the week. Hadley's band are heroes of the South Shore, having made a grand entrance in the festival three years ago by cutting the Duke Ellington band (at that point under the direction of Mercer Ellington). The charts are vintage post-Basie: big streamlined numbers with lots of fancy unison work for the reeds and plenty of rhythmic muscle (Hadley is the band's drummer). On Sunday night they played Basie-ite Frank Foster's arrangement of Ellington's "In a Mellow Tone," and "Come Sunday." Here alto-ist Dave Chapman took the Johnny Hodges role and played it beautifully, especially when he rolled from a light high note into a deep low as the ensemble joined him on the final chorus.

Corea's band included trumpeter Wallace Roney, tenor-sax Joshua Redman, bassist Christian McBride, and ageless drummer Roy Haynes (the one member of the band to have recorded with Powell). A short pre-recorded narrative about Bud Powell introduced the band. They opened with the odd, orchestral "Glass Enclosure" and followed it immediately with a less-than-flying "Tempus Fugit." There was the rarely covered Monk-like "Mediocre," with its jammed intervals and odd angles, and a Corea original, "Affinity," in the Miles modal style. Roney continues to confound, his Miles-ian use of dramatic space, long held notes, and sideways scalar explorations taking him no place. Redman seemed more intent on trying different tacks (and different horns: besides his usual tenor, he also played soprano and alto). Aside from some solo fireworks, though, the band didn't jell until "Un Poco Loco," the final number, where Corea, McBride, Haynes, and Redman played with the Latin cross-rhythms, pulling the beat every which way, maintaining linear tension but playing very freely. Corea's two-fisted chording in particular drove Redman's alto. A Haynes drum solo served as audience-rousing coda.

After that, it was Spyro Gyra, and the end of this year's Globe Jazz and Blues Festival.