The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/arts/music/30-bands-perform-in-jazz-colors-at-central-park.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0
The cornetist Kirk Knuffke was playing music for an idyll at midafternoon on Saturday: “Skating in Central Park,” an elegant waltz composed by John Lewis for the Modern Jazz Quartet. There were no skaters in sight, but the scene felt otherwise right. Mr. Knuffke and his band mates, in winter coats, set up beside a footpath at the park’s northeast corner, facing the glassy surface of the Harlem Meer. A stone’s throw behind them buses moved unhurriedly along Duke Ellington Circle; on an adjacent park bench someone busily filled in Mr. Knuffke’s image on a sketch pad, complete with hat and beard.
It was a moment both delectable and ephemeral, one of the many made possible by Jazz & Colors, which featured 30 groups interpreting the same two sets of standards, at the same time, throughout Central Park. A large-scale performance piece made up of countless small-scale impressions, it was physically impossible to take in as a whole. Musically speaking it yielded the occasional awkwardness, usually as a matter of location or materials. But its overriding success was in creating an atmosphere of festive and serendipitous discovery and making jazz accessible in every sense of the word.
Jazz & Colors was conceived by Peter Shapiro, the jam-band impresario behind Brooklyn Bowl and the newly refurbished Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y. Working with the Central Park Conservancy he and his fellow producers set out to create an active and immersive experience, drawing direct inspiration from “The Gates,” the monumental public-art project mounted by Christo and Jean-Claude in 2005.
“The Gates” transformed the topography of Central Park, along with its rhythm; Jazz & Colors was a more modest undertaking, designed to mesh peaceably with the park’s regular human ecology. The site-specific work that actually came to mind, as the sound of one band wafted across a tree-lined concourse, was “Her Long Black Hair,” an intimate, affectingly haunting audio walk created by Janet Cardiff in 2004.
Where the Christo comparison held was in the choose-your-own-adventure aspect, and the communal emphasis, of the event. During my itinerant sampling of Jazz & Colors, covering about half the bands across the park’s expanse, I kept finding small but cheerfully attentive crowds: at the Dairy, for a nimble quartet led by the saxophonist Jacques Schwartz-Bart; along the Meer, for a soul-jazz band led by the saxophonist Jason Marshall; on the Bethesda Terrace, for a young quintet sponsored by Jazz at Lincoln Center.
The roster of artists, mostly booked by Brice Rosenbloom, who produces the Winter Jazzfest, covered an admirable diversity of styles, though there was a countervailing force: the identical set lists, lightly skewed toward autumnal standards. The intention was to create some continuity, and sometimes it clicked, as when I left the Naumberg Bandshell and hustled over to Bowling Green Lawn, hearing two versions of the Charles Mingus ballad “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” by the Mingus Big Band and the Yes! Trio.
Some groups fared better than others with the repertory, and some used it as a liberal guideline. One commanding post-bop quartet led by the tenor saxophonist J. D. Allen spent a half-hour taking down “Straight No Chaser,” its first tune. (There were eight more songs to check off in that set, and I don’t know how they all made it.) Later I heard the Kevin Hays Trio play a song in the second set that had been intended for the first.
Mr. Hays, stationed beside a rocky outcrop, was playing a Wurlitzer electric piano — refreshingly, given the day’s preponderance of battery-powered synthesizers — with an introspective focus that bordered on the perverse. Transitioning from “Body and Soul” to “Nature Boy,” he chimed a slow sequence of chords, interspersed with chasms of silence and eventually some trancelike singing. It was stubbornly uningratiating, as evidenced by a smattering of bicyclists who dismounted, waiting to be engaged, and finally took off.
I did too, but only reluctantly, knowing the event’s finale was near. It was “Empire State of Mind,” by Alicia Keys and Jay-Z: an anthem all but tailor made for the ministrations of Elew, the aggressively enterprising pianist formerly known as Eric Lewis.
Playing a grand piano from a standing lunge, Elew approached the song delicately and then demonstratively, with a strobelike staccato and a strong pull of crescendo. By the time he wrapped up, a sizable crowd had gathered; there were shouts for an encore, but he was cautioned against it. A crew was already in place, waiting to break things down and reclaim one corner of the park for nonmusical purposes. Maybe next year.
pillowleaves 