Concert Review: Freihofers Saratoga Jazz Festival (Day 1) @ SPAC, 06/24/2023

“Bad weather: good show” goes a decades-deep outdoor concert calculus.

So it played out in Saturday’s 11-1/2 hour, 12-act super-soaker: Freihofer’s 46th Saratoga Jazz Festival.

Gentle or pounding rain didn’t drown the fun or the funk, though walking around brought a real risk of umbrella-rib-end jabs in the face. The pan-aroma was different from the summery usual: no tropical-fruit sunblock tang and not much bug-spray buzz, either; just soaked camping gear. The music adjusted the mood to where it should be in any gathering around cool tunes.

Expecting guitar fireworks going in, and we got some, I was mainly awed by drums, and not just by Cindy Blackman Santana, either.

South African pianist-composer Nduduzo Makhathini opened on the (smaller) Charles R. Wood Jazz Discovery Stage (hereafter JDS) at 11 a.m., occupying so much bass register sound space with his pulsating left hand that drummer Francisco Mela mostly rode up top with snare and cymbals. Bassist Zwelakhe-Duma Bellale Pere bridged Makhathini’s thunder and Mela’s splashes.

Makhathini adapted McCoy Tyner-like seething percussive cascades, punctuated with restless arpeggios, and Keith Jarrett’s melodicism and atonal “singing” into explosive or meditative healing rituals. He sees music as a ticket to a better world; its grace, elegance, and serenity supporting his intention of what song can do. Just as displaced people can play music from anywhere, he portrayed endurance of oppression as exalted. Mourning became a celebration, channeling John Coltrane’s spiritual quest through ‘Trane’s pianist Tyner’s sound.

Drummer Blackman Santana also reached back, opening at noon on the main stage (hereafter, the main), though she went back less far. Jack DeJohnnette and Tony Williams are to her what Tyner and Jarrett are to Makhathini. While he sampled the blues, bebop, and New Age, she gleaned a vocabulary of jagged, bristly blasts from 1970s fusion funk, making big noise from a small kit: four drums and four cymbals.

“The Blue Whale” threw down a spiky “Bitches Brew” groove as she invoked Miles’ melodic and rhythmic muscle or Weather Report and Return to Forever adventures. Fusion fans expect pumped virtuosity and she delivered, with keyboardist Zakkai Curtis, guitarist David Gilmore (not the Pink Floyd guy; he’s Gilmour), six-string bassist Felix Pastorius (son of Jaco), and saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (son of John). They hit their stride once Gilmore sorted technical problems; Coltrane played more oblique, like Wayne Shorter; than his celestial father; and Pastorious grooved in a more supportive role than his extraverted dad did, or than he did with the Yellowjackets.

Blackman Santana drove her band by soloing all the time. She hit so many beats, so many grooves, her band just had to listen for her ideas to start their own fires. The chemistry worked so well I stayed with her during most of guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel’s quintet set on the JDS.

Rosenwinkel’s lovely ballad “Whistlers Of Love” echoed ‘Trane’s celestial ballad “Naima” as closely as ‘Trane’s son had with Blackman Santana, and Rosenwinkel and his crackerjack band closed so wonderfully with the bebop “Synthetics” that I wished, not for the first or last time Saturday, to be in two places at once.

So, I missed almost all of veteran Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes Quartet’s set on the main to catch Emmet Cohen in the JDS, urged by musician friends to hang with the young New York pianist.

They were right as rain.

Cohen played every style, every mood, and every era the piano can evoke, with bravura technique, bustling imagination, and personality. He covered the waterfront but in his own colors.

A delicious “Venus de Milo” (Miles) led off, playfully ornamented or sparse, driving; then came “Dardanella,” first of his deep antiques, balancing grace and gravity, melody and movement. Cohen’s Covid-inspired “Spillin’ the Tea” bounced and swung in ragtime glee. And then, and then, the most magically beautiful “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” possible, and I’m including an early 80s Keith Jarrett masterpiece version at the Troy Music Hall.

“Toast to Mo” paid tribute to a departed musician friend (as Snarky Puppy would do later, twice), the slow, sparse “Little Darling” cruised a hesitation blues, then James P. Johnson’s stride delight “Carolina Shout” had singer Claudia Acuna (up next, waiting in the wings) tapping her fan in rhythm, then waving it overhead in the exuberance Cohen created.

Cohen’s go-anywhere improvising kept young (21) bassist Joey Raineri and drummer Kyle Poole on their toes; us, too. Cohen plays A Place for Jazz with his trio on October 20.

Bouncing back to the main after that, I only caught one tune by Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes, as dignified and deep in that one song – “The Very Thought of You”? – as Cohen was electric and zippy.

Sadly, the same hard choice reasoning that limited my time at the JDS for guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel’s quintet also left me only a small taste of Claudia Acuna’s exquisite vocals there, then Carolyn Wonderland’s guitar blues.

Acuna’s “We Are Dreamers” thrillingly surveyed human striving for the good, just as Makhathini had in his opener. She sang in English and Spanish, hitting both brilliant falsetto heights and heart-deep tones ala Cassandra Wilson in the too-little I saw. Between main-stage acts, I caught even less of Wonderland, a fiery slide-guitarist who was wrapping up a “Jambalaya”-like romp as I got to her, then an ode to her boots collection that was more amusing than cheesy-materialistic and a lap-steel strut that went full hoe-down.

Meanwhile, Tower of Power and Cory Wong were earthquaking on the main.

TofP celebrated 55 years of Oakland funk, which has always been about “Diggin’ on James Brown,” as a song late in their suavely confident big-beat set clearly stated. They’ve played together so long that drummer David Garibaldi has quit and returned three times. Only saxophonists Emilio Castillo (tenor) and “Doc” Kupka (baritone) remain from the 1968 lineup, but as Castillo explained mid-set, “the horns would be nothing without the rhythm section” – as the horns stutter over a steady throb.

While tenor man Tom Politzer, trumpeter Adolfo Acosta and singer Mike Jerel did the heavy lifting up front, Garibaldi, hyper-active bassist Marc van Wageningen (in the big shoes of the late Rocco Prestia) and keyboardist Roger Smith made it all go. TofP is all about making you, the listener, get up and shake it. The crowd gladly did. The band sandwiched “You Got to Funkifize” and “You Ought To be Having Fun” early in a way-too-alive-to-be-just-nostalgic album-length look-back including their “Down to the Nightclub” and “You’re Still a Young Man” – also James Brown’s “This Is a Man’s World” with Jerel’s intense vocal.

Next up, also filling the same stage, Cory Wong’s band made more modern Minneapolis funk (i.e., Prince-ly), faster but just as tight. They opened by brashly detonating the Warner Brothers film fanfare to hilarious perfection. Wong conducted, to laughs and awe. Up front, his hyper-speed rhythm guitar was the band’s gas pedal, and he almost never soloed. He used his mic to intro the band, uniformly clad in powder blue jackets with piping, like a curling squad might sport, and to shout-cue chord and rhythm changes. All manner of high-energy pop-funk flooded off the stage in generous surges of snappy beats, combustible horn riffs – in sections or solos, all of it virtuoso work – and they about out-funked Tower of Power with a happy fierceness, or vice versa.

Like TofP, though, the rhythm section ruled: tireless, hard-hitting drummer Petar Janjic, bassist Yohannes Tona, keyboardist Kevin Gastonguay and, most of all, Wong himself. His arrangements set up delicious tension, then released it with big bangs as horns blended and burst, flamed together or fought things out. The sheer sonic force of it felt exhilarating; but once the smoke cleared, Wong’s arranging smarts impressed just as much. The late-set one-two punch of “Home” and “Sidestep” were maybe the funkiest tunes all day and night.

Wong obligingly texted me his setlist afterward, correctly pronouncing it a fun show:

• 20th Century // Assassin
• Welcome 2 Minneapolis
• Let’s Go
• Team Sports
• Bluebird
• Kenni and The Jets
• Cory Wong
• Home
• Sidestep
• Flyers Direct
• St. paul
• Lunchtime

As has become customary, the last set on the JDS brings either an Afro-pop or New Orleans band to make everybody dance-crazy. Saturday was Glen David Andrews’ turn, a trombonist and singer, cousin of Trombone Shorty, and a four-alarm fire heating up the place. Hot-footing it up there after Wong’s supercharged funk-fest, I found more of that flavor; though I didn’t mind arriving in the last pump-the-crowd chorus of “When the Saints Go Marching In” – a formerly can’t miss tune now badly over-exposed. Better was “Rain and Hurricane,” appropriate to both New Orleans and the soggy afternoon as Andrews celebrated his hometown’s resilience.

Next up on the main, singer-activist Angelique Kidjo from Benin sang of liberation and love as guiding principles for all interactions and of an idealized though oppressed Africa; hearkening back to Makhathini hours earlier

Interesting, at least to concert-nerd me, was how both Wong and Kidjo impressed from the start, but cover songs pushed both their sets into overdrive. Wong’s mutation of Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets,” renamed “Kenni and the Jets” and funkifized, charged the crowd from a kind of passive awe with direct-current lightning.

Likewise, Kidjo’s songs, often sung in non-English, engaged everybody on sheer musical punch and passion. Then Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” transformed more aggressively than Wong’s “Jets,” brought everybody into her movie. Visually, Kidjo is arresting, tiny but kinetic; in full dance, she’s all flying elbows and feet that barely touch the stage. Her “We Are Africa” packed a more direct anthemic message than “Once In a Lifetime.” When she sang “Sisters, why do you let men take our powers?” she fiercely made clear there’s no good answer and a correction is overdue. Paying tribute to the groundbreaking, highly independent cross-cultural star Celia Cruz, Kidjo claimed her own independence, and she managed to ignite a strong sing-along and got everyone standing at the end.

Kidjo stood out also for the compact power of her quartet, surrounded by three main-stage big bands; i.e., armed with more than one horn.

Tower of Power played decades-worth of familiar funk older fans knew and loved; Wong played tunes few knew (except for “Jets’) but everybody knew the funk riffs he built into big things, like Sonic Leggos; then Snarky Puppy closed with a wider variety of musical colors and tempos than either predecessor and songs likely more familiar to more fans than Wong’s.

Snarky Puppy adds violin to the guitar, bass, keyboards, drums and horns recipe TofP and Wong aimed at the audience; and this proved key.

An elastic band built by bassist Michael League, Snarky Puppy might have seemed an unlikely closer at past festivals; but they quickly earned their spot with ambitious, well-made songs and impeccable playing. Their horns made surprising chords that grew more so when Zach Brock’s often electronics-modified violin joined the flow. Unexpected combinations of sounds brought Brock into harmony not just with saxes and trumpet but also Mark Lettieri’s guitar. Riffs formed fleeting alliances within songs, then went off to find new friends, though the songs had intelligence and clarity that swerved from start to sometimes amazing finishes.

League calls them a “pop band that improvises a lot, without vocals.” Sometimes their “pop” was a gleeful clatter, then a rhythm overdrive, next a cacophony like a music store falling downstairs.

But when they went sweet, wow.

“CliRoy” paid tribute to trumpeters Clifford Brown and Roy Hargrove (the latter once played this festival in rain more violent than Saturday’s). Naturally, trumpeters Max Maher and Jay Jennings gently put these departed giants to rest. Two songs later came another tribute, to Bernard Wright, a former mentor of the band. This bluesy ode of poignant emotion hit like a mellow bourbon.

I went out onto the lawn to hear the sound there which is sometimes better than inside. I’d only caught brief bites of the sound there while commuting between stages. On Saturday I stood still and sank into the sweet reverence of an emotionally and musically united band mourning a friend.

Meanwhile, over the amphitheater, the rain had, eventually, moved aside – pushed by sheer audience endurance? A crescent moon shone through the pines and stars aimed silvery beams down at us through a thin fog.

It was perfect.

Photo Gallery by Rudy Lu