“I’ve always loved playing at Ronnie’s,” Locke continues. “Of course, I miss the old guard, and I miss ensconcing myself in Soho for a six-night run at the club, which I always used to do. Oftentimes I’d follow Roy Ayers’ residency and arrive in London a day early, to catch Roy’s last night. It’s always been one of the preeminent clubs in the world, and we’re always warmly welcomed.”

He’ll project a decidedly different ambience than the six-night residence in 2005, which featured fellow mainstem jazz masters Mike LeDonne (piano), Bob Cranshaw (bass) and Mickey Roker (drums), and resulted in the inexorably swinging, jazz radio chart-topping Milt Jackson tribute, Rev-elation (Sharp-9). Twenty years later, Locke, with pianist Jim Ridl and bassist Lorin Cohen from his multi-generational American working band, along with Alyn Coster (subbing for regular drummer Samvel Sarkisyan), will navigate repertoire from his summational album, Makram (Circle 9, 2023). Makram spans standards to the leader’s rhythmically challenging, harmonically dense post-bop compositions, as well as music from Subtle Disguise (Origin, 2018), on which David Binney (alto saxophone) and Adam Rogers (guitar) augment the group at various points, as does singer-guitarist Raul Midon on three songs.

Locke also intends to perform “a contemporary, very masked version of ‘Airegin’” and a song called ‘Is There A Heart In This House’, that he dedicates to the prominent civil rights activist Reverend William Barber. Both pieces appear on a forthcoming Criss Cross album by Vladimir Kostadinovic, the drummer on the Italian gigs, who developed simpatico with Locke in Amaranth, a collective Euro-based quartet with bassist Ameen Saleem and alto saxophonist Jaka Kopač. Amaranth’s debut album is scheduled for imminent release.

“Everyone is deeply rooted in the jazz tradition but has very eclectic tastes, which comes across in the range of music we play,” Locke says of his quartet. “They can deal with a lot of compositional stuff and also swing hard and groove, which I’m looking for to get the music across. I love that each [player] individually has a lot of history in their playing. Jim Ridl loves Oscar Peterson and Wynton Kelly, but he’s also very much a modernist. The same for Lorin Cohen, who’s really into Ray Brown, but also plays great electric bass and is into all styles. The same for Alyn and Vladimir as well as Samvel – super-smart, high-end players who can fill the formidable role of the drums in my music.”

“Often I go to Europe as a guest with someone else’s band or meet a rhythm section there and do a tour that’s rather quickly put together. This is my first opportunity in ages to bring my core band playing music that’s been gestated and realised over a period of time. So I feel we’ll have something really well-sculpted to present.”

Locke last visited the UK in January, mixing master classes and performances in London and Birmingham with the incomparable woodwindist Tim Garland and pianist Jason Rebello – who was filling the large shoes of Geoffrey Keezer, who has been for the last 25 years the third member of the beyond-category chamber trio Storms/Nocturnes. Locke and Keezer have also played in various quartet and duo endeavours, and they share a long-standing relationship with tenor saxophonist Tommy Smith and his Scottish National Jazz Orchestra. Another more recent high-level UK collaborator is pianist Gwilym Simcock, a partner on several occasions since the 2010s.

“The UK scene seems very healthy to me,” Locke says. “I’m impressed by the influx of inspiring young musicians, such as Helena Kay, Jonny Mansfield, Ben Shankland and Emma Rawicz, to name but a few.” Among the UK or European vibraphonists catching Locke’s ear are Lewis Wright (“a monster player”) and Jim Hart (“one of my favourites in the world”); he adds that Warren Wolf, Simon Moullier and Joel Ross are “absolutely transcendent players who honour the music, honour the tradition, and look forward and push the music forward, each in their own unique way.”

“When I moved to New York in 1981, there were other very good vibes players, but I think myself and Steve Nelson were the young voices coming heavily out of Milt Jackson and Bobby Hutcherson and the jazz tradition,” Locke continues. “Most vibes practitioners couldn’t hold their own with the great pianists, trumpet players, guitarists and saxophonists of the time. I think because of Gary Burton’s influence, a lot of them were weighted down trying to learn how to play ‘Waltz for Debby’ with four mallets instead of just thinking about playing a good linear solo on a blues. That’s changed. I’ve been inspired by the state of the vibraphone today, because there’s a plethora of really good improvisers who would have been great on whatever instrument they chose, but happened to choose the vibraphone. It’s hard to transcend the coldness of the vibraphone, but each one has found a way to make poetry on the instrument.

“I’m a champion of the younger players, because playing the vibes is not an easy path. There’s an extra level of difficulty just because the instrument is unwieldy. So when I see a young vibes player doing well and getting their music out there, it makes me happy.”

It’s clear that Locke’s discursive musical path – along with his legendarily fast hands, precise attack and warm, expansive tone; his expansive harmonic imagination; his command of multiple genres, ranging from swing to post-bop to fusion to avant; and not least, his charismatic stage presence – has influenced the aesthetic development he discerns among his younger legatees. Simcock told UK Jazz News in 2020: “It’s clear how much love and passion Joe puts into what he plays. It’s genuine love for playing music, not affected in any way. Putting ourselves on the line like that is really the best we can do as musicians. Working with Joe has been a great lesson in how to do this.” In a Downbeat Blindfold Test about a decade ago, Warren Wolf – who’s performed several two-vibraphone concerts with Locke in recent years – called Locke “one of the true legends of the instrument.” 

Legend or not, Locke – who was born six months before Ronnie Scott’s opening night – must uphold the high bar he’s set on his physically demanding instrument every time he performs. Towards that end, he regularly lifts weights, as he did directly before our conversation, which transpired as he undertook a daily five-mile walk in the woods around his central New Jersey home.

“I feel in better shape now than in my early 30s,” Locke said, not sounding even slightly winded. “I haven’t slowed down at all. I’m grateful for my good health. I still need to practise as much as I ever did, because, as I tell anyone who asks, I’m only as good as the time I’m putting in on the instrument. What I work on most is language, vocabulary, and how to express what I want to say artistically. I have a bigger palette now. When I want to express something, I know how to get to the heart of it a little more easily than I once did. Sometimes that means playing a lot of notes. Sometimes it means knowing how to not play very many notes to make the statement you want to make. Maybe my development over more recent years, as I’ve gotten older, is learning how to edit and say specifically what I want to say without too much searching.”

The post Joe Locke at Ronnie Scott’s, 29 Oct first appeared on UK Jazz News.

One of the many pleasures of the 2023 edition of the Amazonas Green Jazz Festival in Manaus, Brazil, was the opportunity to hear two concerts of works by Ed Sarath, Professor of Music in the Department in Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation – which he founded in 1987 – at The University of Michigan School of Music, Theater and Dance, and Director of the interdisciplinary U-M Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies. Sarath, 70, also plays flugelhorn and serves as president of the International Society for Improvised Music (which he founded).

He’s a prolific author, most recently Black Music Matters: Jazz and the Transformation of Music Studies (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) which, along, with Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness: Jazz as Integral Template for Music, Education, and Society (SUNY/Albany, 2013), he describes on his website as “the first to apply principles of an emergent, consciousness-based worldview called Integral Theory to music.”

Sarath’s c.v. description may sound a bit abstract and academic. His two festival concerts were anything but. He presented five pieces on opening night, including scorings of two poems by Manaus-born poet-journalist-composer Anibal Beça (1946-2009), on which the chorus raised a joyful noise, at one point collectively improvising vocally at some length on a passage before resolving back to the harmonic structure. He concluded the concert with Amazonia Verde Para Sempre (“Amazonas Green Forever”), a vivid suite inspired by ecological imperatives. The singers opened with a kind of folk song that served as a leitmotif; the percussion evoked a wide range of sounds culled from indigenous and Afro-Brazilian traditions, conjuring the rain forest that surrounds Manaus and the Amazon’s unique ecology.

A week later, Sarath convened the Amazonas Symphony, the choir and a top-shelf Detroit-centric cohort of soloists (including violinist Regina Carter, resourceful percussionist Mark Stone, bassist Marion Hayden, drummer Gayelynn McKinney, and Sarath on flugelhorn, along with Capetown-based percussionist-flautist-“little instruments” master Dizu Plaatje) to perform a 5-movement, 40-minute interpretation of Maya Angelou’s poem “His Day Is Done,” written after the death of Nelson Mandela in 2014. As Sarath notes, the piece began “with something almost out of Renaissance music, modal counterpoint with just strings,” before the voices entered; the more percolating, “African-inspired” second movement featured solo passages for and Dizu Plaatje. During the third movement, the choir, propelled by primal drums, improvised on Angelou’s phrase “27 years of imprisonment,” then came to a sudden stop – Plaatje concluded with a passage on mouthbow. The strings and brass met the music’s considerable dynamic and rhythmic challenges; the chorus projected a collective soulfulness and passion that did justice to the subject.

On the following evening, he played flugelhorn with the Detroit-Capetown contingent and Brazilian pianist Cris Bloes in an Afrodiasporically-oriented unit called Global Jazz Collective, to which he contributed “19/8,” named for the time signature.

I’m embarrassed to say that I was previously unfamiliar with Sarath’s remarkable career. I did my best to correct that information gap in a conversation the afternoon following the first concert.

**************

INTERVIEW 

UKJazz News: What percentage of your writing is for classical orchestral or large band?

Ed Sarath: I have a fair amount of big band material. I began writing for big band as an offshoot of my small ensemble compositions, as I was always drawn to expanded orchestrational and formal possibilities. On and off, I also have a nine-piece ensemble called Timescape, which has a string trio, sometimes a string quartet, along with rhythm section and two horns. That’s a nice bridge for moving between different genres, which is very easy to sensationalize. For me, drawing from lineages has always been natural; I try to find instrumentation that serves that purpose.

I haven’t studied composition formally. I have some background playing classical music In graduate school, I had a very good regional orchestra gig, and I loved it, but even as I was sitting in the orchestra, I was taking in the sounds as a composer-improviser, improviser-composer, not necessarily as an aspiring professional trumpet player in an orchestra section.

UKJN: That autodidactic background as a composer is not so dissimilar to the paths of the early AACM musicians in Chicago or the Detroit-based musicians who connected with them back in the day. You’re a contemporary of some of the important second-generation AACM figures. Are you from the Midwest?

ES: No. I was born in Ossining, New York. When I was three years old my family moved to Westfield, Connecticut, where I grew up. I started playing trumpet there when I was 10. I was straight classical until coming out of high school, when jazz hit me like a freight train. I started buying records and immersed myself in the sounds. I also read the liner notes and got records the side-personnel made as leaders. Obviously, trumpet players – Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard – were important early influences. But I would see the personnel on their records and branch out from that. It was a very non-linear path in terms of chronology or style; I’d go from Miles to Charlie Parker to Eric Dolphy to Cecil Taylor to Louis Armstrong to Art Farmer to Lester Young. Nobody said, “You’ve got to do this before you do that,” which is a very rigid pattern that permeates jazz pedagogy, although that approach has little to do with the jazz tradition.

I developed a very strong affinity for modal jazz, even though I didn’t even know there was such a thing. I was just drawn deeply into the sound of Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, and of course, Coltrane’s stuff with McCoy and Elvin. Dave Liebman was an important influence, too, way before I had the opportunity to collaborate and become friends with him. And then, in terms of big band writing, everyone was doing Thad Jones and I loved playing his music. Also there was Don Ellis, who did a lot of odd meter things, and was a huge influence.

I went to a small college in Connecticut, Western Connecticut State College, where Jimmy Greene subsequently did amazing things directing the jazz area. That’s where I started composing. They didn’t have much jazz then, which I found frustrating, but in retrospect, it was incredible because I had to sort things out by myself. For instance, I taught myself jazz keyboard voicings. It just dawned on me; nobody suggested this. I thought that no matter what instrument you play, you need keyboard chops. Barry Harris was very articulate on this point. You don’t have to have fast right-hand stuff (unless you are a pianist). You just have to play nice-sounding voicings with extensions. I taught myself that, after realizing that when I would sit down and play, like, I, III, V, VII chords, I’d be thinking “that’s not the sound that we’re getting on the record.” When I started composing small-group and even some large ensemble things in my early 20s, I had no idea what I was doing. But I would not have traded that experience for anything, because it laid groundwork for some of the areas I now explore.

Then I lived in the Midwest, doing graduate work in Iowa City, Iowa, for a while. I also did some freelancing on the West Coast, both in L.A. and a project with a quartet in the Sacramento area. I lived in northern California for a while. Then I returned to Iowa City, which is a college town with a small but happening jazz scene. There I did part time teaching and formed the Iowa City Jazz Orchestra, for which I wrote most of the music. We made a record called Fifth Fall. I also did a lot of small-group playing. People came from all over for lessons. I had some basic creative strategies that apply across instruments and helped musicians evolve a personal sound. We’d cover a lot of ground in my lessons – standard tunes, free playing, innovative approaches on standard rep, composition, harmony, etc.

I started putting my name out for college jobs, and the University of Michigan position opened up. I came in out of left field to even get an interview, but I was one of the finalists and got the job. I didn’t have a doctorate, but I had a Masters, and at that time you could land a teaching gig in jazz with that. I’ve been there since 1987. I think an important reason why I was hired was that I had a fairly well-developed system of teaching improvisation that drew from diverse influences and therefore was highly suitable for engaging classical musicians as well as jazz musicians. I actually formed a faculty improvising ensemble my first year or two with some of the top faculty people. Donald Sinta, for instance, the great classical saxophonist, I got him improvising. Michael Udow was doing some improvising. Harry Sargous, the oboe teacher at the time, plunged into improvisation for the first time, as did. Martin Katz, a world-renowned piano accompanist for opera singers.

The academy has its problems. But if you play it right, it can be a very nice situation, because you have a lot of freedom. If you’re writing music for large ensembles at a place like Michigan, you have access to really good players right down the hall – classical, jazz, big bands, orchestra players, choirs and everything. Also, I’m interested in teaching. I developed a lot of coursework around creativity and consciousness/spirituality and its connection to jazz. I even designed a degree program called Jazz and Contemplative Studies, which caused an intense debate, but I got two-thirds of the faculty vote. It’s one of the first degree programs that incorporates the study of meditation, which is part of the jazz tradition.

UKJN: How did your interest and knowledge and intensive studies in that area begin? I’ll assume, having lived through the time, that the West Coast was where you…

ES: Actually, it was way before that. I spent a summer in 1974, when I was 21, at the Berklee College in Boston. It was a 12-week session while I was an undergraduate at Western Connecticut, which didn’t have much jazz. I was hanging with several musicians who were very involved in meditation, which I got very deeply into, and meditation became an important part of what I do. As time went on, I started seeing the relationship between improvisation and meditation – meditation is improvisation in silence, improvisation is meditation in action, something like that. I started articulating theoretical ideas around that relationship and its ramifications for education and society and have several books and articles on the topic. I deal quite extensively with the nexus between improvisation, consciousness and the evolution of the individual voice, which everyone talks about – but there’s not that much in the literature in terms of understanding its inner mechanics, how it actually develops. I am also very interested and write a lot about collective consciousness – what happens in improvising ensembles, and also what happens in group meditation. Both processes in group formats stimulate deep connections.

UKJN: In 1987, when you joined the University of Michigan, your conception was probably fairly complete. Have you assimilated much new information and vocabulary since then?

ES: Significant pieces were in place by then for sure. Then it was a matter of moving more into a more overt cross-cultural, or even trans-cultural synthesis. The odd-meter work definitely took further strides. The “Amazonas Green Forever” piece last night was basically in a 46-beat cycle — a bar of 12, a bar of 11 (that’s 23), and then another bar of 11, another bar of 12. It’s a symmetry. You can get sucked into the sensationalism of odd-metered music, so I tell my students: “If it’s really happening, it feels as natural as and as melodic as 4/4.” I felt that 46-beat cycle is maybe the closest I’ve gotten to that. I’m happy with how that turned out. When you see it on the page, it looks very complicated, but if you have melodic substance and rhythmic coherence that draws the player in, they’re going to really dig into it. The Amazonas Jazz Orchestra got the music in plenty of time and they did a great job.

I’ve also developed a fairly extensive system of rhythmic training that draws from various sources, Indian, Mideastern… For a while I did things with Don Cherry’s-Karl Berger’s ta ki ga me al, but then dug into Carnatic konnakol, which sort of replaced that. I interacted with Karl from time to time; we did a recording together. I never went to Creative Music Studio, though met a lot of people that went there and it was always a source of inspiration. So that was part of my identity, too. Karl and I were thinking along parallel lines.

UKJN: I guess Don Ellis’ music could be a portal towards your interest in meditation and consciousness, because his music was drawing on cultures that incorporate meditation in religious ritual.

ES: In that case, kind of Mideastern, with the 2s and 3s. Of course, there are a lot of approaches to meter. But in terms of meditation, India definitely came in there, and of course there’s the rhythmic process of tala cycles, the spiritual connotations of raga structures. I love that kind of connection. Music and consciousness is nothing new, but it’s such a deep subject. I think that’s a pathway for the future of education, the future of humanity in terms of how we realize human potential. Improvisation, music consciousness, spirituality.

UKJN: Were you involved in those years as well with “the avant garde,” the AACM people, people like Bill Dixon, the use of extended techniques on trumpet and things like this?

ES: This is an interesting question. I was drawn to free improvisation early on in my jazz journey, but I never really thought of it as free jazz. I came to realize that free improvisation and free jazz are not the same. Free improvisation can include free jazz, and vice versa. I didn’t really run into the AACM until I had already been doing free improvisation, as well as a number of other kinds of improvisation and composing, for a while. Then I realized the AACM is a whole lineage. I haven’t tapped into it directly as much I would like, but have drawn great inspiration from it. I’ve interacted with Douglas Ewart on several occasions. George Lewis and I have had some connection, more sort of scholarly than playing. I had Oliver Lake play with our University of Michigan Creative Arts Orchestra, a large improvising ensemble, a couple of times – once in Chicago and another time in New York.

Back in 1987, I did some classical orchestration, using strings. But actually, my writing for choir is a relatively recent development. I’m trying to figure out where this came from, because at the point when that happened, I was deep into writing books and articles. So I’m combining, trying to keep my chops together as a brass player, doing some composing and also publishing like that, because I felt like I had a story to tell, theoretically, aesthetically, philosophically. Being at a big conservatory and seeing first-hand the marginalization of jazz and Black music, I wanted to bridge those boundaries and tear down the racial biases.

I realized that you can develop coursework that gives classical musicians opportunities to dig into Black music, which I did. I teach not just jazz with classical musicians, but do more of an open stylistic, open approach to improvisation. But as soon as you’re dealing with rhythmic grooves, you’re dealing with Black music, which raises issues for musicians mainly with classical backgrounds. If you’re coming from a European perspective, it’s very hard to dig into the rhythmic, embodied dimensions of Black music, let alone the improvisation process. I think George Lewis’s Afrological-Eurological distinctions are important in this context. You don’t just go from Eurological into Afrological lineages, You must do some serious work.

The choir writing is interesting because it forced me to come to terms with a foundational melodic core that I always thought was one of my strengths as a composer – and a player, too, if I might say so. Generally speaking, voices aren’t capable of the technical things you can do with, say, writing a sax soli; you won’t write fast tutti passages for voices as you might for saxophones or strings. Writing for voices initially also involved simpler rhythmic ideas. But when I connected on that level, my instrumental writing, just from a technical standpoint, blossomed in terms of counterpoint, dexterity, ability to handle more involved kinds of things. That was a very important development for me. I’m still in that mode.

UKJN: Do you do comparative cultural studies of consciousness regarding African, Afrodiasporic and Indian music and other polyrhythmic musics with animistic origins rooted in calling forth deities?

ES: Well, there’s aspects of that. My approach is to combine practical engagement with meditation and related practices with theoretical principles. In the mid-90s, I started teaching a class around 1996 called Creativity and Consciousness. It was in the School of Music, but it was offered to students from across fields – student-athletes from inner cities, along with kids from the humanities and sciences, as well as to music majors. The thrust of the class was dealing with consciousness from a practical standpoint with certain meditation techniques, and integrating theoretical/historical principles in that context.

I developed rhythmic exercises for music majors (but you also can use them for athletes), inspired by Karl Berger’s Gamela Taki, which he got from Don Cherry. Athletes can use those things to enhance their performance because it’s improvisation. We’d deal with consciousness from the standpoint of a transformation that you can directly experience, and then we use that as a lens to look at different models of consciousness. The academic materialist view of consciousness tends to reduce everything to neurological activity in the brain. That’s a tiny aspect of the bigger picture, especially when you go to indigenous worldviews where consciousness is primary in the whole cosmos. So I use that kind of materialist/post-materialist dichotomy as a lens to critique the academy as based on European epistemology – that is, basically reducing knowledge and reasoning in human beings to information – when indigenous worldviews have a much bigger picture. Let’s use the arts, let’s use consciousness to expand that picture.

Even though students come from various fields, the class is offered as part of the Jazz Department, so let’s look at jazz as a vehicle into Black Afrofuturistic views of consciousness, ancient to the future. Dealing with Afrofuturism is more recent for me. But I could have used the word back then, thinking about somebody like Sun Ra. Speaking of Afrofuturism, I’m designing a new course on UFOs, and the connection between improvisation, consciousness and extraterrestrial intelligence.

UKJN: Music does operate in conjunction with the physical laws of the universe…

ES: There’s so many angles. The story of Black music is part of our national legacy and our national healing. It’s also a global story. I believe that you can’t tell the story without going deep into human creativity and spirituality. And when you open it up like that, the question of whose story is it collapses or gives way to an answer that this is really everyone’s story and it’s up to all of us to tell the story, to refine it. The Black Music Matters class is not just about jazz and it’s not for jazz students only. There is also a connection to a stream of thinking in the jazz tradition that white musicians cannot play jazz as authentically as Black musicians, I have no problem with that. I still have to tell my story musically the best I can, and I’m going to do it. I teach this class the same way. I think the more you can frame it in terms of big questions, you don’t remove the complications, but what you can do is diffuse the knee-jerk reactions.

UKJN: Do you plan to continue teaching?

ES: Yes. I’ve been teaching for 36 years and still have things I want to do in that capacity.

The post Amazonas Green Jazz Festival, Manaus, Brazil first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Perhaps the most consistent throughline of the 2023 edition of the Amazonas Green Jazz Festival in Manaus, Brazil, was the reliably inspired presence of the Amazonas Band, a state-funded 20-piece ensemble comprised of local musicians. On four concerts in that city’s spectacular opera house over the course of the ten-day event, the band nailed two challenging orchestral pieces by composer Ed Sarath and five precise, complex numbers by Felipe Salles, and played sophisticated Brazilian Pop arrangements by conductor (and festival organizer and founder) Rui Carvalho. On the final night, they propelled trumpet icon Randy Brecker and guest tenor saxophonists Salles and Rodrigo Ursaia through five funk-drenched charts, nailing the twists and turns with crisp New York studio precision and a kinetic samba funk feel generated by drummer Airto Silva and percussionist Knison Ribiero. If you weren’t present, hear it for yourself on Brecker’s latest release, Live in Amazonas, which documents the exact same program at the festival in 2022.

The concert resonated for Carvalho on multiple levels. “I studied anthropology at the University of Lund, in Sweden, which had a jazz season every year,” Carvalho recalled. “I was into 11^th House, and Larry Coryell came through, and I expected to see Randy, but he was no longer in the band. The next year, Billy Cobham came behind his recording with the Brecker Brothers, but neither one was there. Now here I am recording with this guy in the middle of nowhere, in Manaus!”


He mentioned a similar anecdote involving Dave Liebman, whose testimonial prefaces this article, during the oil crisis of 1973. “I’d gotten a job in a supermarket that I needed to pay my tuition, and on my very first day of work Miles was going to be in Malmo with his group that Dave played in,” he said. “I couldn’t go. Almost 50 years later, I played with Lieb in Manaus with my own big band. Life is amazing.”

Born in Portugal, Carvalho came to Sweden as a refugee. “I had to sneak out in order not to be sent to Africa for the colonial wars, which I couldn’t agree to,” he says. He’d attended the famous November 1971 Lisbon concert where Charlie Haden was arrested after performing “Song for Che” with the Liberation Music Orchestra and then stating, “I would like to offer this composition to the liberation movements of Angola and Mozambique.” “The crowd was going crazy and shouting, because people were so tired of that stupid war,” Carvalho continues. “I was 16 at the time. Our future was to be sent to the war — and for what? It was like fighting against myself. The cops watched everything. They knew about everything.”

In 1974, Carvalho heard the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra on a tour behind the album Suite For Pops, sparking his big band obsession. In 1978, he emigrated to São Paolo. Over the next 23 years, he became a professional drummer and classical percussionist and painstakingly taught himself the art of arranging while teaching at Tatui Conservatory, 100 miles west of São Paolo. In 2001, he arrived in Manaus at the invitation of Inês Daou, then the director of the Amazonas Theater, one of several state-sponsored cultural institutions — among them the Amazonas Philharmonic, an opera company, a choir, a ballet, a modern dance company and a big band — that developed under the two-decade tenure of State of Amazonas Secretary of Culture Robério Braga. “Everything that happens culturally now in the Amazonas State is due to Braga’s incipient work over 20 years ago,” Carvalho says.

In addition to creating a college level jazz curriculum and working towards a Ph.D in ethnomusicology, Carvalho worked intensively with the big band. “It was a hard task because the musicians weren’t too aware of the language of jazz music,” he says. “But some of these guys were very gifted, so I thought it was worthwhile to give it a try and work hard — and we did. During those years, we didn’t work much at the Opera House; it was mostly the symphony orchestra. Every year we have a tourist season, with cruise ships coming from overseas. In 2004, one of those cruise ships was here and the Philharmonic couldn’t play for them. We were told to play for the tourists. I told the guys in the band, ‘Listen carefully – we will play Brazilian music, and we’ll never leave the opera house again.”

Soon thereafter, Carvalho received an enthusiastic email from an audience member who ran a college music program in the U.S. He showed it to Braga, who was impressed. He reminded Braga of his promise in 2001 “to raise the standard of the band to a certain level,” and stated that, for further growth, “we will need to play with people from outside.” In 2005, Carvalho invited five São Paulo-based and U.S.-based musicians “not only to play with the band, but also to offer workshops and basic instruction.” Among the beneficiaries were Carvalho’s students at a local arts high school, where he formed a popular music orchestra that included several current members of the Big Band.

In 2006, Secretary Braga assigned Carvalho to organize the first Amazonas Jazz Festival, which included Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Jimmy Greene, John Hollenbeck, Carlos Malta, and Vinicius Dorin, a saxophonist-flutist consequentially associated with Hermeto Pascoal. The band continued to develop over the next eight years, when artists like Liebman, Bob Mintzer, Cláudio Roditi, Proveta, Mauro Senise, Gilson Peranzzetta, Chico Pinheiro, Felipe Lamoglia and Jeremy Pelt performed as guest soloists, while luminaries like Ron Carter, Eddie Palmieri, Leny Andrade, Brian Lynch, Hamilton Holanda, Louis Hayes, J.D. Allen, and Carmen Lundy presented their own bands.

In 2015, various crises in the realms of politics and finance halted government sponsorship, prompting a lengthy, pandemic-extended hiatus.

“In 2019, our new Secretary of Culture, who was once a stage director here, asked if I wanted to organize the jazz festival again,” Carvalho said. “I told him yes, but to wait. I wanted to change the festival name to ‘Amazonas Green Jazz Festival.’ Everyone was talking about the Amazon. With ‘green,” I was thinking not only about environmental sustainability but also cultural sustainability and other related ideas. For me, this festival is more than just an opportunity for people to hear jazz. It has to leave something for us in terms of cultural legacy, in terms of technical development. That’s how our band has developed. Besides building a band, we’re building an audience.”

Carvalho cites “female empowerment” as one idea associated with branding “green,” and the 2023 festival subtitle “Ellas”/(she) reflects his endeavor “to bring as many women to the festival as possible.” Another aspirational trope, perhaps more abstract, is “the need to focus on the new world that we envision for the near future — equity of gender, equity of race, understanding that actually there’s only one race, the human race.” Carvalho continued: “I think the music has been more effective than anything else against racism in the Western world. I want to focus more on the importance of the African continent to our contemporary legacy in the Americas.”

Carvalho’s Ph.D thesis focused on how changes in the Boi-bumbá, an Amazonian folkloric ritual, “reflect a project of building a contemporary sense of identity in the Amazon.” He recalled interviewing a Manaus resident named Mestre Ze Preto (Joe the Black), who said that “when he started his first Boi-bumbá, which is the expression of a local culture, he was helped by people from the candomblé here in Manaus. The Boi-bumbá in Parintins started with a guy named Lindolfo Monteverde, who founded the Garantido, another one of the Boi-bumbás. His ancestors came from Cape Verde in Africa. So you see, there’s a relation. There’s always a relation to know if you go deeper.”

Extrapolating from his thesis to the imperatives that animate the festival, Carvalho stated: “Jazz has shaped a sense of identity in the modern world. Jazz is the art form that influenced and let itself be influenced by other art forms and art expressions. Everything in the 20th century was influenced by jazz, when jazz started spreading around. At the same time, jazz captured influences from all around the world. It’s a universal culture.”

“This festival is like a dream. No one can offer what we offer here — the forest, the theater, professional groups from the Secretariat of Cultures that work together. What you’ve seen with the big band is impossible anywhere else in Brazil. It’s barely possible anywhere else in the world.”

LINKS: Amazonas Green Jazz Festival on Facebook
Rui Carvalho’s website

The post Amazonas Green Jazz Festival, Manaus, Brazil first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Located in Brazil’s equatorial interior, at the juncture of the Rio Negro and the Amazon River (also known as Rio Solimões), surrounded by the rain forest, the city of Manaus, now the home of 2.2 million, was founded during the rubber boom of the 19^th century, when its four-tiered, 700-seat French Revival opera house, Teatro Amazonas, was built. Still isolated from the rest of Brazil by vast distance and difficult terrain in 2023, Manaus — which was established as a free export and import zone in 1957 — is home to several hundred international corporations and a well-educated population, and is the capital of the State of Amazonas, whose Secretariat of Culture sponsors an opera company, a dance company, a theater, a folkloric guitar company, a symphony orchestra, a 70-voice choir, and an accomplished jazz big band with a magical groove. This virtual island is also home to a sophisticated, completely realized cuisine that cannot be replicated elsewhere, based on regional fish species, fruits, root vegetables, and grains.

The surreally spectacular Teatro Amazonas, most famously depicted in the Werner Herzog film Fitzcarraldo, was the prime locale of the 2023 edition of the Amazonas Green Jazz Festival. Festival Director Rui Carvalho — himself a conductor-educator-composer-drummer-anthropologist-author — curated the programs with abiding hipness, aesthetic soulfulness, and pragmatic daring, juxtaposing concerts by renowned and obscure Brazilian musicians, many of them regional, with international bands, and also commissioning large-scale programmatic works. Carvalho further signified on the Amazon milieu by explicitly acknowledging “woman warriors,” i.e., Amazonas do Jazz,” by inviting numerous groups formed or led by women, as indicated by the festival logo, on which the word “Ellas” (“she” in Portuguese) subtitled a head shot of Ella Fitzgerald.

Carvalho presented these parallel streams on night one. The festival began with Amazonia Green Forever Suite, comprising five separate pieces by Ed Sarath that incorporated multiple rhythms and timbres of Brazil, performed by the Coral do Amazonas and the big band,. Particularly memorable were scorings of “Uma Vida (One Life)” and “Constatação (Finding)” by Manaus-born poet-journalist-composer Anibal Beça (1946-2009) on which the chorus raised a joyful noise, at one point collectively improvising on a significant passage before resolving back to the harmonic structure.

The second act was a quintet helmed by Camille Thurman-Green including trumpeter Wallace Roney, Junior, a chip off the old block who played a series of well-proportioned, idiomatic solos, and pianist Victor Gould, who did the same. On four instrumentals, among them a reharmed “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and the Miles Davis-associated “So Near, So Far,” Green played tenor sax with broad registral range and a husky tone that, for some reason, evoked Stanley Turrentine crossed with Bennie Maupin. She sang another four with a seemingly no–limits voice, including a “Going out of My Head” that mashed up the styles of Dianne Reeves and Betty Carter. On “Easy to Love” she opened with a bravura intro upon which, after Roney said his piece, she elaborated with several inspired scat choruses.

A week later, Sarath (the subject of a forthcoming LJN profile) presented an inspiring 5-movement interpretation of the Maya Angelou poem “His Day Is Done,” written after the death of Nelson Mandela, with the Amazonas Symphony, again joined by the choir and a top-shelf Detroit-centric jazz cohort including violinist Regina Carter, resourceful percussionist Mark Stone, bassist Marion Hayden, drummer Gayelynn McKinney, and Sarath on flugelhorn, along with Capetown-based percussionist-flautist-little instruments master Dizu Plaatje. Before a capacity crowd, the strings and brass met the music’s considerable dynamic and rhythmic challenges; the chorus projected a collective soulfulness and passion that did justice to the subject.

On the following evening, July 28, the aforementioned personnel and Brazilian pianist Cris Bloes convened as the Afrodiaspora-oriented Global Jazz Collective, performing one piece per member. Not everything suited the instrumentation, and the set began tentatively. The momentum palpably shifted halfway through with Sarath’s “19/8,” picked up momentum with Carter’s “Black Bottom Dance” (featuring the composer’s high-energy solo), and concluded with a highlife on which Plaatje sang and danced, projecting his abiding musicality on several ingeniously self-constructed and indigenous instruments.

On that evening’s first show, Recife-based pianist Amaro Freitas presented his singular Afro-Brazilian-Jazz concept, playing primarily songs from his third CD, Sankofa, with a kinetic, breathe-as-one trio, concluding with a long solo piece (foreshadowing the format of an upcoming 2024 album with collaborators including Shabaka Hutchings, Hamid Drake, Brandee Younger and Jeff Parker) that highlighted his unique blend of Afrofuturistic attributes. He knows his post-Coltrane/Hancock/Shorter harmony; creates melodies that connect strongly to his audience and narratives centered around Brazil’s African and indigenous cultures; juxtaposes fluent classical (legato) and percussive techniques that evoke Cecil Taylor and Don Pullen, augmented by homegrown prepared piano implements that morph the piano into a virtual synthesizer (particularly when Freitas addressed the strings and the piano’s exoskeleton with a small shaker) and a drum choir.

Pianist-composer Ellen Rowe, Sarath’s University of Michigan colleague, presented her “Portraits of Women in Motion” suite by an octet propelled by Allison Miller, who locked in with the always on-point Marion Hayden on a series of well-organized shuffles, swingers, second-liners and funk tunes with nice melodies and improvisation-facilitating changes. Nadje Noordhuis evoked various Ellington trumpeters with relentless lyricism, and tenor saxophonist Virgina Mayhew uncorked several fresh solos, as did Felipe Salles (subbing for Rowe’s scheduled altoist, who was unable to travel), who elicited a Sanbornish tone from a borrowed horn, interacting with Miller’s various syncopations and accents.

Himself a highly accomplished tenor saxophonist and composer, Salles presented a top-shelf sextet — Noordhuis, Natalie Cressman, trombone and vocals; Nando Michelin, piano; Keala Kaumeheiwa, bass; and Bertram Lehmann on drums — to play reductions of involved, highly satisfying pieces from his accomplished new album Home Is Here, which features bespoke “tones parallel” to Paquito D’Rivera, Melissa Aldana, Yosvany Terry, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, Chico Pinheiro, Magos Herrera, Sofia Rei, and Noordhuis for 19-piece orchestra, the themes based on interviews with the soloists.

Salles presented another five numbers culled from different points along his timeline with the Amazonas Big Band (conducted by Maestro Carvalho), which nailed all the complexities. Earlier in the set, Carvalho danced the band through several of his creative, Gil Evans-ish charts on “Chega de Saudade,” “Desafinado,” “Dindi,” and several others, including a few with local singer Márcia Siqueira, whose soulful contralto evoked Leny Andrade, who’d passed away earlier that day. Preceding them, another accomplished Amazon-region guitarist, Ismail Nascimento, played primarily original songs with a strong trio propelled by a good drummer (didn’t catch his name) who had an array of samba-jazz rhythms at his disposal.

Salles’ sextet concert followed a terrific “straight ahead” quartet set by guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg (with Roy Haynes’ pianist of choice Martin Bejerano and drummer Colin Stranahan) who concluded with a vertiginously metric-modulated, multi-perspectival tour through “You Don’t Know What Love Is.” Bejerano remained in town to play trio with the iconic Havana-born drummer Ignacio Berroa (Dizzy Gillespie, Gonzalo Rubalcaba) and bassist Edward Pérez, completely in synch on a definitively swinging set, fueled by maestro Berroa’s elegant metric modulations and Bejerano’s kinetic improvisations on bebop and Cuban vocabulary. Earlier in the day, Berroa presented a master class on his lived and familial experience of a Cuban music timeline spanning Barbarito Diez through Gonzalo Rubalcaba. I learned a lot.

They followed São Paolo pianist-singer Anette Camargo’s tribute to Tânia Maria’s hits from the 1970s and ’80s. Brazilian witnesses, intimate with the repertoire, reserved judgment. To my monolingual ears, Ms. Camargo is a dynamic performer, a two-handed piano player who can go percussive or rubato, with much bebop and Cuban vocabulary at her disposal. Her supple, powerful voice spans several registers. The drummer was too loud, but she interacted beautifully with the resourceful percussionist Danilo Moura. For some reason, I felt serious Dorothy Donegan vibrations.

On the previous evening, tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana presented her touring quartet, including interactive pianist Lex Korten and drummer Kush Abadey, who played with tremendous sensitivity, nuance, pulse and intuition. Maestro Aldana’s exquisite tone traversed all the registers as she patiently developed her themes — the vibe, more or less (forgive the pithiness), was Jarrett’s ’70s European quartet meets 21st century Wayne Shorter.

That Aldana went on fairly late, to a sparse audience, was unfortunate. The house had been full for an intense solo concert by São Paolo pianist Heloisa Fernandez, performing eight elegant, intense originals that evoked a flavor I’ll summarize as Villa Lobos meets Jarrett meets Mehldau. The patrons remained in place for an entertaining set by Quinteto Flow, fronted by singer-bassist Aline Fagan, who effectively interpreted primarily American standards and a few Brazilian numbers with a tight band including Marcelo Figueiredo on piano, guitar and bass and Neil Armstrong Jr. on guitar.

For the penultimate evening, Maestro Carvalho instigated the first-ever piano duo concert by Eliane Elias and her early mentor, Amilton Godoy, an iconic figure in MPB for his contributions to the Zimbo Trio from 1963 to 2002, and a pioneer in Brazilian piano expression. It was a tour de force, traversing George Shearing’s “Conception,” Bud Powell’s “Bouncing with Bud,” Chick Corea’s “Armando’s Rhumba,” Godoy’s “Choro,” and various Brazilian and Latin classics (“Esta Tarde Vi Llover,” “So Danço Samba,” “Batida Diferente”) that Godoy performed when they were new. The concert was recorded and filmed, and will be a worthy addition to Elias’ distinguished canon of duos with Herbie Hancock and, more recently, Chucho Valdés and Chick Corea.

On the final evening, Elias returned with a quartet (bassist Marc Johnson, drummer Mauricio Zotarelli, and a good guitarist) to sing a program of Brazilian standards, signifying on the lyrics with expansive solos that transpired to her signature left hand comping, refracting the percolating samba pulse of Cesar Camargo Mariano with the urgent swing feel of post Bud Powell American piano lineage. In a lovely piece of theater towards the end that evoked the early days of bossa nova, she transformed the corner stage-left into a São Paolo living room, convening the band behind her for several intimate pieces, with the ever-supportive Zotarelli on a single snare drum. A bit later, she invited Randy Brecker onstage to play pithy duos on Fats Waller’s “Don’t Let It Bother You” and a Brazilian standard.

Brecker, now 78, who’d arrived in Manaus after a 24-hour travel day, played an opening set of his good-old-good-ones with the Carvalhos-conducted big band, which nailed Vince Mendoza’s famous charts of “Some Skunk Funk” and “Straphanger,” as well as “First Tune of the Set,” “Tijuca” and “Shanghigh”. Launching off intense samba-funk beats from the world-class trapset-percussion team of Airton Silva and Knison Ribiero, Brecker found fresh things to play, expanding the flugelhorn’s range with nonchalant savoir faire (think Miles Davis rhythm-dancing executed with Bill Dixon extended techniques), raising his fist to acknowledge strong solos by alto saxophonist Ênio Prieto and the excellent guitarist Aldenor Honorato. Guest tenor saxophonists Salles (“Skunk Funk”) and Rodrigo Ursala (“Straphanger”) admirably channeled Michael Brecker, which is saying something.

The post Amazonas Green Jazz Festival 2023 (Part 1 of 3) first appeared on UK Jazz News.