Well, hello there! It’s been a minute since my last dispatch, owing to some cross-country travel and blissful family time. Thanks for being patient with me; I hope this finds you thriving, or at least more than surviving, as summer rolls along.
I have more to catch you up on, but first I’d like to fulfill a promise and bring you my report from the Newport Jazz Festival — with the proviso that I have longstanding ties with the event, and shouldn’t be seen as a strictly objective observer.
I also want to express endless gratitude upfront to Dave Kaufman and Jonathan Chimene, a photographic tag team who provided all of the striking images for this post. Now let’s get into it, shall we?
Festival Junction: Newport Jazz, Anew
Samara Joy cracked open a portal at the Newport Jazz Festival last Saturday afternoon. It happened toward the end of her set, during “Left Alone” — a song that Billie Holiday wrote with pianist Mal Waldron, but never managed to record. Singing over an episodic arrangement by saxophonist David Mason, Joy made this ballad into a chamber study, then a ghostly aria, with a late cathartic upswell. “There’s no house that I can call my home,” she lamented, soft but sure. “There’s no place from which I’ll never roam.” Her whole bearing was casually regal, braced by the unspoken yet inviolable awareness of a lineage, and a language, to carry forward.
As Joy surely knows, Billie Holiday performed at the First Annual American Jazz Festival (as the inaugural fête in Newport was boldly named) in 1954. Holiday, already an icon at 39, opened a portal in her set, too: at the urging of George Wein, the fest’s enterprising co-founder and producer, she was joined by Teddy Wilson, Buck Clayton and Lester Young, as on a series of beloved late-‘30s Columbia sessions. Decades later, Wein described this special reconvergence as “a raison d’être for a jazz festival.”1
We’re now 70 years out from that auspicious first Newport Jazz confab, and the commemorative urge holds strong. No other music fest shoulders the weight of history quite like this one — but at its best, that burden feels more like a gift.2 Certainly this was the case when Joy was singing, backed not only by a crisp rhythm section but also a clutch of horns. It was also true in a handful of other sets I sampled, like an intensely alert “Legacy of Wayne Shorter” tribute with three of Shorter’s acolytes — drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, bassist John Patitucci and pianist Danilo Pérez — behind an inspired and slippery Ravi Coltrane on saxophone. (Hearing these masters elasticize “Miyako” over a low, strobing pulse felt almost mystical.)
This year, Newport Jazz sold out all three days well in advance — a sign of robust health both for the festival and, on some level, for the art form. Artistic director Christian McBride and Newport Festivals Foundation exec director Jay Sweet, marshaling their small but valiant team, put together a lineup that attracted the jazz faithful, the jazz-curious, and a likely handful of the merely jazz-tolerant. Big-name headliners like Nile Rodgers & Chic, Elvis Costello and André 3000 provoked some jazzfolk to grouse in advance that the festival had lost the plot — but at any given moment across its three stages, something vital and undeniable was going down.
McBride, who presides over the festival grounds like a genie just sprung from a lamp, brought his deep-earth bass prowess to a Jam Jawn featuring two Hall of Famers, trombonist Fred Wesley and singer Dianne Reeves. His curation and cosign also brought us a next-gen Newport 70 band with the likes of trumpeter Giveton Gelin and saxophonists Nicole Glover and Braxton Cook. All weekend, McBride was a gracious master of ceremonies, heralding artists onstage with the warmest of welcomes: I especially enjoyed a Philly-pride toast of master Kenny Barron and his trio.
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Johnathan Blake, the agile, indomitable drummer in Barron’s trio, also led his band Pentad, featuring Immanuel Wilkins on alto saxophone, Joel Ross on vibraphone, David Virelles on piano and Dezron Douglas on bass. Their silvery alchemy felt like a dispatch from dead-center of the modern jazz mainstream — even when, as on a tune like “Groundhog Day,” they were grooving in a brawny headnod mode.
Several other highlights felt similarly rooted in the firmament. Artemis, which long ago transcended supergroup status to become a just-plain-killer band, brought one such jolt, with MVP honors shared by Glover and drummer Allison Miller. The brief bit I heard of Julius Rodriguez was swinging and sure. And Nicole Zuraitis, riding high off her long-shot Best Jazz Vocal Album win at the Grammys, demonstrated the sort of resourceful adaptability that I associate with a true jazz artist: “Travel,” which fit her melody to lyrics by Edna St. Vincent Millay, led into “Reverie,” which fit her lyrics to a melody by Claude Debussy. (Then: a lively cover of Dolly’s “Jolene.”)
I’ve sounded off here before about the legacy of fearless protest at Newport, from Mingus to Nina and well beyond. Some years, I feel let down by the minimal traction on this front. This year, I felt supercharged — and not just by the nimble fire of Noname, an underground rapper whose live show exceeded my high expectations.
On Sunday afternoon, Meshell Ndegeocello dug in on the Fort Stage with a battery of songs from No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin — a bracing album that cares not for our questions of civility. “Baldwin had a bit of a blind spot with feminism,” Ndegeocello chuckled at one point, teeing up one of the most indelible songs from the album, “Thus Sayeth the Lorde” (as in Audre, not Ella).
On Friday, Baldwin’s 100th birthday, Aja Monet turned the Harbor Stage into a space for exhortative metaphor and ecstatic community-building, reciting her poetry with shape-shifting support from Logan Richardson on saxophone and Justin Brown on drums, among others. “We are in unprecedented times in this country,” she declared, acknowledging her privilege and purpose as a truth-teller among the festive horde. This led into “The Devil You Know,” raucous and righteous, a blaze with a walking bass line. “Revolution is not a spectator sport,” Monet urged, as the band’s clamor abruptly ceased. “Silence — is a noise, too.”
There was also a message in the music during drummer-producer Kassa Overall’s Sunday-morning set, notably in a version of “Prison and Pharmaceuticals” that found him spitting bars out front while Tomoki Sanders thumped a driving four-on-the-floor house beat. But you’d be forgiven for thinking that Overall’s whole aim was rapture: with a clattering mix of house, dub, rumba and funk, he made it a party.
That sounds trite, but I mean it: at one point, Sanders, mainly a saxophonist, hopped offstage and sprinted around the full perimeter of the Harbor Stage enclosure (clanking a cowbell en clave as they did), before rejoining the band for an Art Blakey-esque orgy in rhythm. The only way to follow such a high is with brazenness, as Overall did — with an outrageously fun cover of “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” the 20-year-old viral hit by beloved NBC Olympics commentator Snoop Dogg.
I’m tempted to say Overall delivered the most satisfyingly visceral thrill of my Newport Jazz experience this year — but that would be shortchanging both the hot-rod funk of Ghost-Note, which felt like P-Funk with a sugar high, and the muscle-car fusion of saxophonist/keyboardist/producer Terrace Martin, which unexpectedly reminded me of Billy Cobham’s Spectrum. (On guitar: Nir Felder, whoa.)
But nobody delivered more wallop than Brittany Howard, one of the non-jazz artists I was most looking forward to experiencing in person. It’s common knowledge that her band, irresistibly propelled from the drum chair by the unbelievable Nate Smith, harnesses jazz protocols toward a funkier purpose.
But I somehow wasn’t prepared for just how hard they go, and how much musical intelligence they project along the way. Guitarist Brad Allen Williams and keyboardist Paul Horton were crucial parts of this matrix, which expanded to include a couple of guests who’d played their own sets earlier in the day: saxophonist Jaleel Shaw (stretching out on “Samson”) and guitarist Cory Wong (soaring high on “History Repeats”). Howard herself was a dark magus of soul, occasionally evoking everyone from Curtis to Otis to Prince — but holding her own center of gravity. She belongs in the soul pantheon, and I daresay she belongs at the Newport Jazz Festival. If you have a problem with that, I’ll assume you also have a problem with this, and this.3
On the subject of other crossover bookings: Costello’s wry strivings met with mixed reviews (despite a band that was absolutely stacked), while André 3000’s flutish putterings seemed to me a qualified success (earning mostly dutiful cheers).
But I did experience one verifiable megastar: Laufey, the Icelandic chamber-pop princess — er, make that goddess — whose rocketlike ascent has divided the jazz commentariat into bickering factions. I’ve been waiting for my first true immersion in Laufey-land, and this was it. Without falling too deep in a well-appointed rabbit hole, I’ll note here that she’s a much surer vocalist than I’d previously realized, with unerring pitch control and a canny sense of phrase. There isn’t a hint of pyrotechnics, or even much spontaneity, in her performance practice — but she’s as emotionally legible in her songs as an Olivia Rodrigo (and to be clear, that’s meant as praise).
There was jazz pulsing in the bloodstream of Laufey’s swoony, languid songs, even when their tone and texture leaned more toward old-Hollywood glamour. Her lyrics cycled through infatuation, idealization and dissolution, with a welcome helping of arch ennui. But she also turned her gaze longingly toward the jazz tradition — adding some cello pizzicato to the standard “I Wish You Love,” and outfitting her own dreamy “Like the Movies” with a coda that (wink, wink) called “Misty” to mind.
The Newport crowd, not nearly as skewed toward adoring young women as Laufey’s typical audience, nevertheless showered her with ravishing attention. And unlike André 3000 — who quipped from the same stage, “All I know about Newport is the cigarettes” — Laufey rhapsodized about what a surreal honor it was to play the festival. (She recalled seeing esperanza spalding there in 2022.) By now she knows a thing or two about big stages: a couple of days later, she headlined the Hollywood Bowl. But she seemed genuinely touched to be there, and to be welcomed.
In our conversations about Newport Jazz, Wein often liked to say that “the festival should mean something.” I took him to mean a high artistic standard in balance with a sustainably broad appeal. When I consider Laufey’s remarks, in the context of this year’s box-office success, I think of that meaning as a foundational standard in perpetual motion. What could be more jazz than that?
The quote is from Wein’s Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, which I co-authored (see p. 141 in the 2003 hardcover edition). I can attest that this was his exact and emphatic wording; I can practically still hear him saying it.
Another fest that does play into its own deep lore is Newport Folk, and lately it’s easy to recognize some best practices carrying over from one Newport bash to the other.
If you know anything at all about Christian McBride, know that he’d be the first to have a chuckle at these examples. HEH!
This report means the world to me, such a welcome tonic after the break. I’m still sore that this kind of depth and verve in reporting jazz has receded from our narrowing flagship publications, but here in this redoubt it’s so inspiring for those of us who weren’t there — to get fresh news and a wide-angle historic record of Newport ‘24. I also feel that I’ve been given a rest-of-summer’s worth of listening and exploring hot leads right here. Thanks!
Was waiting for this! Thank you. I went to NFF (first-timer) and it blew my mind. I too saw Brittany (my second time on this tour), and it was off the charts. Cory's set at Folk was super fun (Victor Wooten on bass). Digging into Ghost-Note now! See ya back in the 215.