{"id":5811,"date":"2016-05-05T15:55:26","date_gmt":"2016-05-05T15:55:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=5811"},"modified":"2016-05-05T15:55:26","modified_gmt":"2016-05-05T15:55:26","slug":"from-the-white-house-south-lawn-an-expansive-view-of-jazz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2016\/05\/05\/from-the-white-house-south-lawn-an-expansive-view-of-jazz\/","title":{"rendered":"From the White House South Lawn, An Expansive View of Jazz"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Wayne<\/a>
Wayne Shorter, Esperanza Spalding and Joey Alexander perform during “Jazz at the White House”\/photo Steve Mundinger<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nMore than halfway through a gala star-studded jazz concert at the White House on Friday came one stirring performance. Wayne Shorter, who at 82 is an elder statesman and perhaps jazz\u2019s greatest living composer, dug into \u201cFootprints,\u201d a composition he first recorded a half-century ago. He played in trio: with bassist Esperanza Spalding, who at 30 is a star in ascent in her own right and among\u00a0Shorter\u2019s closest disciples; and with Joey Alexander, who was raised in Indonesia and will soon turn 13. Shorter played in quick flurries and bright bursts of sound, stating his music\u2019s theme only obliquely. It was he, not Alexander, that exuded a child\u2019s sense of playfulness. Alexander played piano with mature restraint and implied wisdom, not just regarding the tune itself but also what Shorter wanted done with it, which was less about reverence or history than possibilities in the moment.
\nThat performance, as it played out on the stage within an elaborate tent on the South Lawn of the White House, didn\u2019t appear within \u201cJazz at the White House,\u201d the primetime ABC-TV special that aired on Saturday night and can be streamed online<\/a> through May.
\nInstead, the network used taped segment, played inside the White House\u2019s East Wing, under a portrait of Bill Clinton. The sound was likely better in there, the visual intimacy heightened by closer quarters. Even so, perhaps it was all too intense, or maybe such instrumental abstraction tries a TV audience: The cameras cut away before the trio was through.
\nEven in abbreviated form, the scene communicated a great deal about what jazz musicians reach for when they make music as well as the music\u2019s reach\u2014across generations, geographic borders and audience demographics.
\n\u201cJazz at the White House\u201d was the centerpiece for International Jazz Day, an event coordinated each year by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Washington, DC-based Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. According to its organizers, \u00a0Jazz Day \u201chighlights the power of jazz as a force for freedom and creativity, promotes intercultural dialogue through respect and understanding, and unites people from all corners of the globe.\u201d
\nJazz doesn\u2019t often get a primetime network showcase. The last one I recall coincided with the Monk Institute\u2019s tenth anniversary, in 1997. That program, also on ABC, was titled, \u201cNissan Celebrates American Music,\u201d honoring the sponsor but treating the word \u201cjazz\u201d as if it were among the four-letter words prohibited by network brass. That overriding notion of propriety\u2014\u201cAmerican music”\u2014was expressed in curiously contrasting ways. A banner\u2014\u201cJazz\u2014America\u2019s Classical Music\u201d stretched above the stage. During one monologue, Singer Billy Dee Williams explained that jazz was \u201cAmerica\u2019s only indigenous art form.\u201d So jazz was both our indigenous and our classical music, which would be a neat trick to turn. The televised hour also demonstrated a disconnection between the American mainstream (or at least the TV folks) and the jazz world. At each turn, dancers who looked to have stepped of a Las Vegas revue cavorted, suggesting little but the idea of suggestiveness. Cameramen seemed to struggle to find each next shot\u2014thrown off by the subtle, organic musical interaction that doesn\u2019t make for a firm cue sheet.
\nLast weekend also wasn\u2019t the first time that jazz had visited the seat of American political power. Nearly every president since John F. Kennedy, who invited Paul Winter\u2019s sextet to perform a children\u2019s concert in 1962, has hosted jazz musicians. Bill Clinton celebrated his first inauguration with a jam session on the White House lawn in 1993; he even joined in on saxophone. Jimmy Carter honored the 25th<\/sup> anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival with a veritable South Lawn festival of his own in 1978; the dozens of performers included Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. In 1969, the Nixon White House hosted a star-studded black-tie dinner and concert in honor of Duke Ellington, to celebrate Ellington\u2019s 70th<\/sup> birthday and award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom (and perhaps to soften the snub after Ellington was denied a Pulitzer in 1965). The lineup was astounding\u2014the pianists alone included Ellington, Earl Hines, Billy Taylor, Dave Brubeck and Hank Jones. (Much of that event, worthy listening, is available on \u201cDuke Ellington 1969: All-Star White House Tribute<\/a>\u201d).
\nAt that 1969 event, after the planned performances, Ellington played a short blues-based improvisation dedicated to the president\u2019s wife Pat. Vice President Spiro Agnew sat down at the Marine band piano to play his favorite Ellington tunes, \u201cIn a Sentimental Mood\u201d and \u201cSophisticated Lady.\u201d Duke danced with presidential secretary Rosemary Woods, who was not yet a household name.
\nJazz and American identity have been engaged in a strange dance of metaphor, patriotism, aesthetics and politics for the better part of the past century. Jazz at the White House, set in motion by remarks by President Obama, added graceful steps, full of inviting nuance, to that embrace.
\n
\"photo\/<\/a>
photo\/ Steve Mundinger<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nObama didn\u2019t pick up a saxophone Friday night, as Clinton once did. But during his opening remarks he recalled his own indoctrination into jazz, when, during a visit, his father took him to him to his first jazz concert\u2014to see Dave Brubeck in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1971. \u201cI didn’t realize at the time that it had, but the world that that concert opened up for a 10-year-old boy was spectacular. And I was hooked.\u201d Obama focused less on the facts of jazz\u2019s history than it spiritual promise\u2014\u201cthe unspoken bond of musicians who take that leap of faith together. There is something fearless and real about jazz,” he said. “This is truth-telling music.”\u00a0He made reference to trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie\u2019s 1964 campaign as a write-in candidate, and recalled a\u00a0Gillespie campaign pledge: to change the name of the White House to the Blues House.
\nThe list of musicians who played at the White House on Friday included at least two alumni of Gillespie\u2019s final band, which the trumpeter pointedly named United Nation Orchestra: pianist Danilo P\u00e9rez, who is a native of Panama, and tenor saxophonist David Sanchez, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico. The concert\u2019s most emphatic message seemed to be, as Irina Bokova, Unesco\u2019s director-general said from a podium at one point, that jazz is a \u201cglobal music of freedom and dignity\u201d and that it is \u201cnow owned by people all over the world.\u201d
\nObama expressed much the same. “Perhaps more than any other form of art, jazz is driven by an unmistakably American spirit,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is, in so many ways, the story of our nation\u2019s progress. Born out of the struggle of African Americans yearning\u00a0for freedom. Forged in a crucible of cultures\u2014a product of the diversity that would forever define our nation\u2019s greatness.\u201d
\nIf all that sounds cloaked in patriotism it is loosely and expansively so. And it sounds like a break from\u00a0the ways that jazz typically gets wrapped within notions of American Exceptionalism, and even imperialism. This concert and TV show, not to mention the hundreds of events that spilled forth on Saturday, International Jazz Day, in more than 190 nations, advanced the claim\u00a0that jazz shed its borders, as Dizzy suggested decades ago.
\nIf this campaign\u2014and as a campaign, it was a relief from the usual hand-wringing efforts to save jazz from extinction or irrelevance\u2014has a face, it is Herbie Hancock\u2019s. The pianist, who is a Unesco good-will ambassador and chairman of the Thenlonious Monk Institute of Jazz, spoke from the podium of jazz as \u201cstanding for hope in a world that doesn\u2019t always make things easy.\u201d As a player, he stuck mostly to being an accompanist and facilitator: playing knowing keyboard obbligati to Aretha Franklin\u2019s piano during her riveting opening performance of Leon Russell\u2019s \u201cA Song for You,\u201d which she began rubato, as if in prayer, and the kicked into subtle swing; playing piano, switching up the chords with near-sinister mastery to \u201cSister Moon,\u201d which Sting handled impressively; and anchoring a medley as memorial for Prince, which featured the rapper Rapsody.
\nThis being TV, the proceedings included a heavy rotation of singers. Dee Dee Bridgewater and Kurt Elling turned \u201cSt. James Infirmary\u201d into too much of a nightclub revue, though the tune began in lovely fashion, with a fanfare from the United States Army Herald Trumpets giving way to the Rebirth Brass Band, and included the witty blare of Trombone Shorty\u2019s solo. Al Jarreau, the least slick in a bill that included Dianne Reeves, Jamie Cullum and Diana Krall, was the most creative and endearing. And Hugh Masekela, the South African fluegelhorn player, was the most stirring, leading a singalong of his apartheid-era protest song, \u201cBring Him Back Home (Nelson Mandela), with Bridgewater harmonizing in the style of Miriam Makeba.
\n\u201cJazz at the White House\u201d didn\u2019t allow for the longer form that jazz often takes or even the organic developments one hears on, say, that 1969 album from the White House Ellington celebration. There was no way that \u201cSpanish Key\u201d could have lasted the more than 17 minutes it did on Miles Davis\u2019 recording, \u201cBitches Brew.\u201d Yet even under four minutes it delivered some satisfactions, not least a hard-edged guitar solo from John McLaughlin, who played on the original version. So did Wayne Shorter and pianist Chick Corea, both included here.
\nCorea anchored another musical bright spot, and another sequence I wish could have gone longer, leading \u201cStraight Up and Down,\u201d which was on his own 1968 debut recording.\u00a0Here, trumpeter Terence Blanchard asserted himself with a bold and wily solo; it was a rare televised showcase of a jazz musician, in his prime, being his accomplished self, and not mugging for the camera.\u00a0For Blanchard, who born and raised, and still lives, in New Orleans, the chance to perform at the Obama White House brought redemptive promise. He\u2019d turned down an invitation from the Monk Institute to appear at the Bush White House several years ago. Then, in the wake of the floods that resulted from the levee failures following Hurricane Katrina, and in light of the federal government\u2019s slow and weak response to the tragedy, \u201cI just couldn\u2019t show up and smile as if it was okay,\u201d he told me then.
\nJazz often gets entangled with politics, and this concert had some interesting subthemes. None more so than, early on in \u201cJazz at the White House,\u201d when pianist Chucho Vald\u00e9s dug commandingly into \u201cCon Poco Coco,\u201d a descarga first recorded in the 1950s by his father, pianist Bebo Vald\u00e9s. Paquito D\u2019Rivera played a gorgeous clarinet solo as he stood next to the piano. D\u2019Rivera was a founding member and saxophonist in Irakere, a group Vald\u00e9s created, and that ignited a musical revolution in the 1970s in their native Cuba. (Irakere\u2019s blend of jazz, rock and Afro-Cuban roots music was both a subversive response to Cuba\u2019s postrevolution rejection of American culture and a seed for the Cuban dance music later known as timb\u00e1.) But by 1980, D\u2019Rivera had resettled in the United States, and has since been an outspoken critic of the Castro regime. Vald\u00e9s (who lived in Cuba until several years ago, when he moved to Spain) has remained one of Cuba\u2019s proudest cultural exports. Save for an impromptu performance at a French festival in 2008, the two hadn’t shared a stage in more than 30 years.
\nThe moment also highlighted President Obama\u2019s recent and historic efforts to normalize relations between the U.S. and Cuba, which holds the promise to restore a cross-cultural relationship that speaks to very origins of jazz as well as its future. Vald\u00e9s was among the cultural treasures denied to U.S. audiences for much of the Bush administration. Following a memorable December 2003 engagement by Vald\u00e9s at Manhattan\u2019s Village Vanguard, no other musician living in Cuba played in the U.S. until 2009, when the Obama administration began loosening travel restrictions.
\nThe group that performed \u201cCon Poco Coco\u201d embodied the ambitions of \u201cJazz at the White House\u201d and the message of International Jazz Day. Along with Valdes and D\u2019Rivera, from Cuba, and bassist Ben Williams, a Washington DC native, it included: Indian tabla master Zakir Hussain; Australian trumpeter James Morrison, and guitarist Lionel Loueke, who grew up in Cotonou, Benin.
\nThe most forgettable and regrettable moment of \u201cJazz at the White House\u201d came at the concert\u2019s end\u2014a full-cast rendition of John Lennon\u2019s \u201cImagine\u201d in the style of \u201cWe Are the World.\u201d It was as unnecessary as it was awkward. The sentiment\u2014of global connection, interdependence and compassion\u2014was much clearer in the swirl of Jazz Day activities throughout Washington DC; when Dianne Reeves, who performed elegantly on the South Lawn, gave a concert at a church for the clients of Thrive DC, a homeless services organization for women, and sang: \u201cI am a poster girl with no poster\u2026. I sing no victim\u2019s song\u201d; and when, during a performance by the Duke Ellington School of the Arts at Dupont Circle, Herbie Hancock sat down alongside 16-year-old pianist Sequoia Snyder and supported her daring and accomplished solo.
\nLater in the day, at a panel discussion about Jazz Human Rights and Cultural Diplomacy at the National Museum of American History, Masekela recalled \u201chow jazz drew people like me to come to this country\u201d and how improvised music has \u201calways been a weapon by which African people put the fear of god in oppressors.\u201d He talked about jazz as more than a musical style but also a force that forever changed the way people listen to one another, even how they walk.
\nOn Friday night, following his opening remarks, President Obama gave some illustration of that last point, descending the stairs from the stage with palpably swinging attitude. That part didn\u2019t make the TV broadcast. But the musicians took note.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More than halfway through a gala star-studded jazz concert at the White House on Friday came one stirring performance. Wayne Shorter, who at 82 is an elder statesman and perhaps jazz\u2019s greatest living composer, dug into \u201cFootprints,\u201d a composition he first recorded a half-century ago. He played in trio: with bassist Esperanza Spalding, who at … <\/p>\n

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