 OFAM Soloist, Clairdee |
FESTIVAL REVIEWTime After Time - page 2by Tom Manoff |
|
New artists add to the event's caliber and impact
|
NEW ARTISTS (at least to me) brought new levels of musical and historical engagement to this summer’s festival. Trumpeter Byron Stripling — whose explosive jazz solos are somehow both refined and raw — also sang. And his Ol’ Man River demonstrated how deep a river OFAM is starting to swim.
The Broadway musical was created mostly by Jewish immigrants or their offspring, influenced by African American musical traditions. The process of imitating, parodying, blending and transforming remains complicated to unravel. Yet much is becoming clearer. No one argues these days that many Tin Pin Alley songs in dialect were stereotypical and remain offensive to most people. Smart white singers (and choral directors) know it’s time to lay off the dialect and let African-American performers work out what’s right for themselves. Ol’ Man River is particularly overlaid with cultural crust. Its most famous version is by the magnificent Paul Robeson.
Byron Stripling
But Stripling’s interpretation was as much cultural commentary as music: humorous, even ironic in a way that still honored the song. Arriving for the last week of the festival, his performances revealed a gifted and literate musician who can run your head through a whole world in half a minute.
Broadway musicals aren’t jazz. But at the bedrock level of harmony, structure and sometimes rhythm, they’re cousins. Jazz interpretations of these songs by singers like Ella Fitzgerald became masterpieces in their own right. And I’ve always thought that OFAM’s summer festival needed a real jazz vocalist to present its singing styles with authenticity. This year they had one. Her name is Clairdee.
In a time when jazz vocalists are either hard to find or flat-out bogus, Clairdee is the real thing. Notes and words are deep inside her, as are jazz harmonies, and with a beautiful, unforced voice, she’s an exceptional artist. The concert Billie’s Blues, Clairdee’s exploration of the Billie Holiday legacy showed, not only her natural gift, but her sensitivity and smarts about finding in herself an approach that would evoke Holiday’s singing, yet not imitate her directly. It worked.
Bucky Pizzarelli
Peplowski, the festival’s music director, can sometimes seem like a split personality. When playing, he’s sensitive and lyrical, but when talking — well, I can’t write half his jokes here as much as I’d like to. Peplowski may travel in elite jazz circles, but I think he’s also played a lot of gigs in Brooklyn. He’s too young to have played the Catskills. But who knows? Maybe he and Bucky have a place up there. More seriously, the “two Kens” are the same genius. Creativity: one part heaven, one part Brooklyn.
The “great historical moments” theme demanded that Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess have a night of its own. The concert was simply called Summertime, taking its title from the show’s most famous song. As made clear in OFAM’s historical program notes, Porgy and Bess was intended as an “American folk opera,” Gershwin’s attempt to “raise” the American musical to a higher realm of culture.
Now considered a masterpiece, and as much an opera and musical show, Porgy and Bess has found some of that legit reputation Gershwin wanted. But it’s taken half a century, and its arrival has been through the back door. Writes the organization’s Director of Education, Ginevra Ralph: ” Its history has been fraught with broad artistic and social controversy to this day, regarding its content, dialect, and musical authenticity. Yet there is no denying the work’s genius and lasting impact on American popular music.” Throughout this OFAM festival, concerts and program notes left doors ajar, allowing someone after the festival to walk through them, and go even further with music still in the ear.
The Summertime concert was an uneasy push through one of those doors, authenticity again the issue. Maria Jette, a classical singer, was paired with Clairdee, the jazz singer, both backed by a jazz ensemble. Clairdee’s singing was natural and spontaneous, Jette’s was calculated and stiff. Her performance of Fascinating Rhythm was delivered in a tightly- bowed box, so rhythmically square that the many in the audience seemed a bit embarrassed.
At past festivals, Jette had former musical director Dick Hyman at the piano as a collaborator. Hyman is a jazzman first, but he’s also skilled and happy as a stylistic chameleon. He could create a comfortable musical zone for Jette, playing harmonies and rhythms less jazzy and less earthy to suit her somewhat chaste style. Jette will never sound comfortable with a jazz ensemble. Understandably, she maintains her authenticity as a performer with a classical pianist, a format in which she performs regularly and successfully at concerts here in the Winter season. When she performs with Hyman, however, the result is wonderfully authentic in its natural blend of jazz and more straight-laced fare. The issue with authenticity is only sometimes about staying within a tradition. Another type of authenticity is about stepping naturally in and out of historical molds.
OFAM is often up against such stylistic problems, leaping across stylistic boundaries to show connections. A noble effort, surely, and, arguably, what makes OFAM programming so wild and worthy.
But style wraps itself around music like a magical gauze. Innately understood by musicians and audiences, its delicate weave comes easily apart, a kind of “King’s New Clothes” effect. Styles that don’t mesh can cross each other out, stripping all the music on the stage of magic, the result, aesthetic nakedness.
HOME
Email this post