{"id":5254,"date":"2015-07-29T18:56:33","date_gmt":"2015-07-29T18:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=5254"},"modified":"2015-07-29T18:56:33","modified_gmt":"2015-07-29T18:56:33","slug":"mining-music-and-meaning-in-maine-the-deer-isle-jazz-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2015\/07\/29\/mining-music-and-meaning-in-maine-the-deer-isle-jazz-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Mining Music and Meaning in Maine: The Deer Isle Jazz Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"photo:<\/a>
Clarinetist Evan Christopher headlines the Deer Isle Jazz Festival on July 31\/ photo: Jim McGuire<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nI\u2019m off for Maine tomorrow morning, where, for the past 15 years, I\u2019ve curated the Deer Isle Jazz Festival<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0on a gorgeous spot off the Down East coast (for tickets, go here<\/a>).
\nFrom the start, this has been a labor of love for me, and an act that resonates with the themes and purpose of my writing. (That backstory is a long story; you can find it \u00a0here<\/a>.)
\nThe Stonington Opera House, where the concerts are held, reminds me a little of Manhattan’s Village Vanguard, in that it is an acoustically charmed space. Like the Vanguard, it has a history. Through more than a century, it has served, at various points, as dance hall, vaudeville theater, and high school basketball arena. And, not unlike the Vanguard, there’s a sense of unadulterated\u00a0mission. The nonprofit organization that hosts the event, Opera House Arts, sells T-shirts and bumper stickers with this slogan: \u201cIncite Art. Create Community.\u201d
\nThis year, as I travel, I\u2019ll bring along a manuscript in process for a book that began as simply a document of \u201cthe fight for New Orleans jazz culture since the flood, and what it means\u201d\u2014a storyline and mission that has been the dominant thread of my work for the past decade.
\nYet the book has grown into something broader.
\nI’m now aiming to set\u00a0that decade-long story of a struggle\u00a0for and reawakening of New Orleans jazz culture alongside\u00a0what I position as a rebirth of this country\u2019s broader jazz culture, which is has long been based in New York City. In that way, I intertwine two stories of resilience in the face of challenges and of rebirth\u2014one in New Orleans, in the wake of literal devastation, and one in New York, in spite of pronouncements of jazz as dead or stuck in a holding pattern.
\nIt occurred to me that my dual headliners for this year\u2019s Deer Isle Jazz Festival\u2014pianist Geri Allen<\/strong> and clarinetist Evan Christopher\u2014 \u2014<\/strong>personify those ideas.
\nOn Friday July 31, Evan Christopher will lead his Clarinet Road band<\/strong>. Along with him on clarinet, the quintet\u00a0includes two leading New Orleans musicians: drummer Shannon Powell<\/strong>, a hometown hero who embodies the entire history of New Orleans drumming with fleet technique and soulful groove; and Don Vappie,<\/strong>\u00a0whose superior musicianship on bass and banjo is anchored in his Creole heritage.
\nChristopher moved from his native California to New Orleans in 1994. He immersed himself in deep study of what he calls \u201ca clarinet language,\u201d developed in New Orleans a century ago and that, while essential to that city\u2019s traditional jazz, \u201cis really the basis for a world music that can embrace any influences,\u201d he says. After the 2005 floods that resulted from the levee breaks following Hurricane Katrina, Christopher relocated to Paris for a few years. Since his return to New Orleans, he has been dedicated to \u201cbeing an ambassador\u201d for the presentation and refinement of the language and the city he fell in love with decades ago.
\nChristopher is\u00a0an articulate advocate for the primacy of jazz culture in New Orleans. He is equally articulate when expressing\u00a0the uneasy irony that, although the music may be celebrated, those who create and perpetuate it don\u2019t always get the respect they are due. \u201cIn New Orleans, the music community has arguably been in a cultural crisis for two or three generations,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe have staved off cultural annihilation by embracing fictions in harmony with the tourism machine and smiled upon by the \u2018New Right\u2019 and their fetish for nostalgia. Post-Katrina, our community’s leadership was nowhere to be seen and before half of our city had returned, 80% of us came back with hat in hand. The utterance of \u2018jazz,\u2019 which should have represented a true strategy of transformation or an answer to revitalization, quickly became an empty slogan hung from streetlamps.\u201d Still,\u00a0Christopher is, I’d argue, among the more forceful voices advancing a strategy of transformation that may yet take hold.
\n\"Geri%20Allen\"<\/a>On Saturday, August 1, Geri Allen will present an evening of solo piano at the Deer Isle Jazz Festival<\/strong>.
\nWhen the story of jazz since the 1980s is told, Allen will show up in nearly every chapter. She has contributed memorably to the catalogs of several towering figures, including alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman and the late singer Betty Carter. She has worked on equal footing with nearly every standard-bearing bassist-drummer tandem (she hosted one of the last sessions to pair drummer Tony Williams with bassist Ron Carter). As I wrote in a Wall Street Journal piece<\/a> about her:\u00a0\u201cThe profile Allen has carved through her 20 recordings as a bandleader isn’t well conveyed by catchphrases for innovations, substyles or trends. Her music is, by turns and often within a single tune, at once classic and subversive. It doesn’t adhere to any jazz convention or school; rather it absorbs them all, sounds complete.\u201d
\nAllen as returned to the University of Pittsburgh, where she did her graduate study, and now serves as Director of Jazz Studies. In between, she spent 30 years invigorating New York City\u2019s jazz scene, first among the brightest up-and-comers within a so-called \u201cjazz Renaissance\u201d and eventually as one of its reigning masters.
\nAs I wrote in this year\u2019s jazz festival program:<\/p>\n

When I was coming of age as a music critic and journalist, jazz seemed caught in tug of war between its past and its future, between tradition and innovation. It was also almost exclusively a man\u2019s game onstage. Geri Allen\u2019s brilliance as a pianist, composer, bandleader and band member, as a student of masters and then a master teacher of students, helped turn that tug of war over territory into a dance on common ground, transmuting the influence of pianists that came before her\u2014McCoy Tyner, Cecil Taylor, Herbie Hancock into her own vision. She elevated the legacy of the great female jazz musicians that preceded her\u2014Mary Lou Williams, among others\u2014and in large part helped usher in a moment when a great female instrumentalist on a jazz bandstand (or a stellar all-female ensemble, like Allen\u2019s trio with bassist Esperanza Spalding and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington) is no big deal\u2026.
\nBeyond their obvious musical talents, Allen and Christopher share an approach to jazz that is based on deep immersion in legacies and pedagogies and reverence for the music\u2019s spiritual and social dimensions. They see old and new in a continuum, not a struggle. They value community. They embrace change.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m off for Maine tomorrow morning, where, for the past 15 years, I\u2019ve curated the Deer Isle Jazz Festival\u00a0on a gorgeous spot off the Down East coast (for tickets, go here). From the start, this has been a labor of love for me, and an act that resonates with the themes and purpose of my … <\/p>\n

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