The Joy of Less Is More
Jacksonville Jazz Festival 2008 and a side trip to see Jarreau.

Big concerts.  "Sheds" and cavernous arenas.  Lots of lighting, effects, props, staging.  Big festivals.  Throngs of people stepping on or over each other in fields of folding chairs and blankets.  Running to catch shuttles from one stage to another, one ear on the music one eye on your watch.  Getting herded through security checkpoints, though doors, down aisles.  People walk to and from the concession and merch stands, eat, talk or text conspicuously to show off their newest toys.  Somewhere in the distance, you see little specks under shifting colored spotlights.  Suggest something smaller and musicians say they can't afford to tour that way, promoters confirm it, then the people who came for the music quit showing up because they can't see or hear so there is none of the connection that you should have when you hear live music.  The rest quit showing up because they can go to a club, pay a few bucks cover, and talk and text to their hearts content.  Or just stay home and watch a DVD.  The live music experience needs to be downsized and brought back to earth.  The market is forcing that situation faster than some may want and it is tough and uncomfortable for artists who thrived on an arena packed with screaming fans or promoters and producers who wanted to generate hype on the biggest big thing.  Marketing guru Seth Godin wrote a book called "Small Is the New Big."  Embrace it, read it, live it.  Bringing the live music experience back to earth could be the thing that draws people back to concert attendance.  You can see the people onstage and you get to be surrounded by other people who care as much as you do.

I had a whirlwind weekend all set up.  The week of "Less Is More."  Al Jarreau in a smaller, more intimate setting, The Palm Beach Jazz Festival celebrating its second year with a stellar lineup, and a considerably downsized Jacksonville Jazz Festival.  In the case of Jarreau and the Jacksonville Festival, the downscaling created wonderful experiences.  As for Palm Beach, less became truly less as the festival was canceled amidst much drama and confusion.  It probably worked out better.  Instead of scooting all over the state and trying to avoid troopers with radar, I got to experience three days of powerful music.

A side trip for Jarreau: I've been to a lot of Al Jarreau concerts over the years.  Most have been big productions with theatrical lighting and the musicians spread across the stage, horns in one corner, backup vocalists in another, keyboards on opposite sides and the drummer in the middle.  Superstar production for a superstar performer, and I will say that in his case the theatrics never overshadowed the music, that wasn't going to happen with world class musicians onstage and Jarreau is going to always come up with a way to bust out of the structured vibe.  A few weeks after I saw a large-scale Jarreau concert I got to hear Dianne Reeves with a small group in a small theatre on a local University campus.  There was such a connection between her and the people who came to see her.  It was like being a part of a conversation conducted mostly with music.  Everyone hung on to every word and every note.  Jarreau had just released the brilliant and scaled-down  Accentuate The Positive, which featured him in a live small combo setting.  Hearing that music (over and over in my case) made you wish you could hear him in a more low-key setting.  It happened this year.  He did a mini-tour of more intimate venues where it was just him, his wonderful band, and the audience.  Mary Bentley attended the concert and I read her review with more than a twinge of envy but as luck would have it, he brought it to Hard Rock Live in Orlando.  I got to spend the evening with a circle of friends, because that's what Jarreau fans are to each other.  It was a conversation conducted mostly with music.  Nicely unstructured compared to the arena shows, he could talk to us and sing to us and have his way with reinventing some of the songs he knows we don't have to hear done exactly like the record.  We know all the words, in a smaller room we could clap, sing along, and yell out song titles to him, and he could talk and sing to us.  It was one big circle of affection, which I hope he got in full measure because the industry doesn't support artists anymore.  the fans do, and that can be tough for the artists who experienced 20th century stardom to shift into. 

The Jacksonville Jazz Festival started out as a one-day event in the quiet beach-side community of Mayport, Florida, best known for its military base.  Over the years it has grown into a weekend event, expanded to a week, shrunk back to a weekend then went on hiatus for two years.  When the City of Jacksonville took it over, they expanded it to include simultaneous concerts on three stages.  City budget cuts left some people wondering if the festival would happen at all.  As it happened, the show did go on, in a considerably downscaled version, with two days of concerts on the main stage only.  The headliners: Dave Koz, Norman Brown, Najee, Pancho Sanchez, Cassandra Wilson, and John Pizzarelli.  Quite a list for an allegedly downsized event!  You can't get in to see any of these people for 10 bucks, much less all of them!  After several years of jumping on shuttles and hoping one artist's set ended in time for me to catch another one five miles away, or worse, having two favorites playing at the same time, the idea of just setting up camp and staying in one place for the day felt downright appealing. 

Cassandra Wilson: The first time I saw Cassandra Wilson was with Al Jarreau.  Walking into the park a few minutes before she started her late evening set was like stepping back into Thursday night's vibe.  Her performance is pure authenticity, complete immersion in a musical world she and her band create within the moment.  The musicians seem to read each other and feed on a collective instinct that is nurtured by this voice they are surrounding.  Surrounding, not backing up, this voice that is deep, rich, and full.  .At one point she asked that the spotlight that was focused on her be turned off because what they were doing onstage was being done by all of them, not one with the others behind.  Her band starts with a percussion driven jam, then she moves into the center of it with that voice, deep, rich, an instrument that plays with words.  She pulls songs from any place she feels them - classic blues, pop, rock, folk, jazz, Latin, African - she combines them, stretches them, shifts them into new configurations.  She sings, then steps back, moving to the music, and lets the band take over.  I promise myself I will quit taking notes, join the rest of the hardcore fans in the front, and go with her.  Its late, people start to leave.  The rest are drawn close to the stage.  It's not a screaming mob scene like last year's Benson/Jarreau.  She does two encores for us anyway and the band stays a little longer.  How many others went home, watched her on YouTube, and messaged their friends to do the same thing?  The Go Tell My Horse Band is Herlin Riley, Marvin Sewell, Lekan Babalola and Jonathan Batiste.

Najee: Sunday's lineup featured three smooth/contemporary artists who are not only genre starts, but who have established some longevity.  They were all bustin' out of the boundaries of smooth for us too.  Najee actually traveled from south Florida after a late night gig to play a 10 am set in Jacksonville, then he was going to get on the bus and head south again to do a late afternoon gig.  It was a 10 am wake up set that literally chased the clouds away.  It was cool and drizzling when his band hit the stage with a fired up percussion driven groove.  An unexpectedly good-sized crowd had already gathered and most of us were on our feet movin' under raincoats and ponchos by the time Najee strolled onstage in an impeccable white suit.  The sophisticated threads were not an indication of a laid-back attitude though, the seat was funky, sweaty and jamming with some Sunday morning spirit thrown in for good measure.  He took us through a set of favorites going all the way back to his first album and into his latest release, playing Soprano, Alto, and Flute.  The crowd sang along with "Betcha Don't Know What's Going On," and a meditative hush prevailed during "Noah's Ark." Guitarist Chuck Johnson, who spent some time with the B-52s, added an animated rock star presence and had every song smokin' . He also proved to be a first class R&B vocalist with his version of "All I Ever Ask, " which was originally sung by Freddie Jackson. The big surprise was when the band launched into a rousing gospel flavored call and response called "Come With Me" that evolved into "Come Together," with Johnson delivering some sizzling Hendrix style solos. By the time the crowd out of their chairs and dancing to a fired up funky version of Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" the rain had stopped, the sun was out, and the temperature was rising. Both onstage and off!  Najee then graciously spent an hour talking to fans and autographing souvenirs in spite of the time crunch to get to his next gig. A hard working, caring, artist for sure.

Norman Brown was in the spirit. That's the best way to say it. There was a presence bigger than the band onstage and that presence was the spirit of music itself. At one point, he was talking about taking up guitar and starting to spend more time practicing and less time playing with the neighborhood kids. “Music chooses us,”  he said, and when music chooses you, you let it take you where it can. His elaboration on where it took him was a narrative about how he discovered his musical heroes while he spun off the licks that he learned under their influence. He took us through Hendrix, Montgomery and Benson throwing down hard rock and cool jazz with equal skill and enthusiasm.  While his recorded work has been somewhat laid back, Brown onstage is something different entirely, possessing a kind of showmanship that is totally driven by the music he is playing. The Benson influenced “Lydian,” was a show stopper, he took Luther's “Any Love” to entirely new places and “Out of Nowhere” up a few notches on the energy scale, kicking back only for a slow jam take on “For Love Of You.” While Najee's band was percussion driven, Brown's was more textural and keyboard oriented under the guidance of his fabulous musical director Gail Jhonston, who has just released her own solo CD.

Dave Koz: I was approaching this set with ambivalence. On one hand, the guy put out three of my favorite CDs, has been an ambassador, advocate for contemporary/smooth jazz music and put on quite a show the last time I saw him, which was a long time ago. On the other hand, he released a CD that reignited my fear that my elders might have been right about growing up to listen to orchestrated easy listening music. Plus, he works for the company that filtered out every interesting element the genre had to offer. No need to worry, this wasn't some smooth smarmy LA guy playing soothing music. Dave Koz is a fabulous musician and a consummate entertainer who works the stage, works the crowd, and lets the guys behind him shine bright too. He dug into a lot of the stuff from “Lucky Man” and “Saxophonic,” like the blasting, heavily funked "Silverlining." He got the crowd into three part harmony on "Can't Let You Go (The Sha-La Song)," left the stage and played a ballad to a woman sitting at one of the front tables, and showed why he is one of the finest pop instrumental songwriters out there with a series of hits - "You Make Me Smile," "All I See Is You," and "Together Again." The pacing was masterful, a mix of up-tempo scorchers, ballads and everything in between. All the while moving all over the stage, interacting with the guys in the band who were all posing, strutting, even running, jumping and throwing in some tasty dance moves. Fun that wouldn't let up. Keyboardist Brian Simpson got to show his skills on a song from his solo CD, and guitarist Randy Jacobs, guitar hero, well...when he's in the band it's always a party.

So that's how the streamlined festival went. Fabulous performances from some of our premiere acts, a lot of people realizing that this music we call smooth jazz is nowhere near “dying.” It's alive and busting out on stages across the country. Several things stood out. One was the amount of rock influence throughout the day, from Najee and Norman Brown giving props to Hendrix to Randy Jacobs soloing with Koz's band. Also, many more people had beer than wine and everyone was dancing. And (!) they all hung out and signed at the autograph tend until every fan was taken care of. Who needs multiple stages and lots of glitzy peripherals? We had everything we needed right there in the park!