Wishing for more jazz: The first part of the first day of the 2022 Indy Jazz Fest

It's a nice project that Rob Dixon has headed to make a partial survey, now recorded and  publicly available, to celebrate some of the current musical achievements of central Indiana.

"From the 317" helped introduce the Indy Jazz Fest Saturday afternoon at Garfield Park. The band was headed by saxophonist Dixon and guest star Derrick Gardner, a trumpeter of excellent stamina and a canny sense of just what to contribute when. The redoubtable drummer Richard "Sleepy" Floyd laid out the basic pulse and the energy associated with the heavy groove that's useful in both funk and hip-hop contexts. Brandon Meeks, an equally wide-ranging and inventive bassist, provided mainstay status in the rhythm section, which was filled out by keyboardists Reggie Bishop and Kevin Anker. Joining Gardner and Dixon in the front line was guitarist Charlie Ballantine. 

Rusty Redenbacher  (center) at the microphone, with star horns Gardner and Dixon to his right.

The guest stars given cameo status included prizewinning singer-songwriter Josh Kaufman and a brace of rappers whose performance benefited from a quick-to-the-point Gardner solo. Anker had a captivating solo as Bashiri Asad's vocal performance climaxed. The finale, the title piece of the new recording, was "Fresh Air." Its performance Saturday included pungent solos by Meeks and Ballantine.

But there were too many signs in the set that hip-hop culture is now considered part of jazz culture. I've been called a "gatekeeper" on cultural matters, which seems to me a label designed to make a critic feel uneasy about judging changes in any genre under discussion. I'm well aware that jazz history includes regrettable surges of "that's not jazz" cries from people whom history has judged simply wrong, whether the target was bebop or Ornette Coleman. 

The fact remains that Wynton Marsalis' dismissal resonates with me. He once told an interviewer that when any kind of performance has dispensed with melody, a pattern of sung or sounded pitches, it has sacrificed something essential to music. 

The verbal ingenuity of rappers may astonish, but if you can pick up only a few words at the pace of delivery, what's the point if there's no semblance of a tune to hang your hat on? There's thus more music in Screaming Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" (to grab an example almost at random) than what hip-hop seems to offer. On the other hand, the wide-ranging critic John Rockwell has commendably suggested that music is best defined as "organized sound," so I won't conclude with a wave of the hand that rap, with its three-decade history of achievement and popularity, is "not music."

Vocalism that stems from pop performance, in both style and volume, also has taken root in jazz. Here I'm in a distinct minority, since the only jazz vocalists I prize are Jimmy Rushing and Louis Armstrong, with much of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday (especially when Lester Young is on the date) in second place. Clearly this may be seen as unfair to jazz singers who happen to be still alive and active. 

But Terri Lyne Carrington, a drummer with an impressive resumé and distinctive credentials in music education, offered a set in which I had to focus hard on her special qualities while putting up with the thick instrumental and vocal context. She's a resourceful drummer who responds faithfully to her current band, as she has with some of the most eminent figures in jazz.

I did find something to appreciate in her female vocalist, whose name I didn't catch. Apart from her sincere attempt to involve the audience in a sing-along on "We Shall Overcome," the group finale, there was a plethora of vocal techniques and stylistic aplomb in her contributions. There were squawks, piercing high notes, and a wealth of idiosyncratic ornamentation. Some of it resembled the yodel-like innovations of Leon Thomas, who enjoyed a vogue in the 1960s and '70s. Approaching a cadence, she sometimes sang her version of the trillo caprino, a bleating sound of staccato repetitions of the same note best known to another type of music lover from the operas of Claudio Monteverdi.

If one is reminded of familiar features in music one isn't sympathetic to, it's helpful to remember the composer Edgard Varese's complaint that people tend to listen with their memories rather than their ears. But I'm always looking for a way I know into unfamiliar music; otherwise I get worried that my sensitivity may be deadening.

It was clear when Norman Brown took the stage that much of the audience was more in tune with him than I.  They knew his songs. They were singing along with him and his vocalists. The shock of recognition seemed to reverberate around the growing audience at MacAllister Amphitheater.

He's got a busy, evocative guitar style that straddles the border between acoustic and electric. In "After the Storm," a song from 1994, his harmonies and sound brought to mind attractive qualities in the playing of Bola Sete, a Brazilian guitarist active in the  '60s. The twangy soul vibe of Brown's playing elsewhere folded in reggae-like episodes and country guitar. But when you draw back to take the larger view, what comes across is a pop star with some jazz chops to display, fronting an r&b (or "urban contemporary") band.

All sorts of crossover have long been practiced at jazz festivals ever since George Wein invited Chuck Berry to entertain at the Newport Jazz Festival in the 1950s. You can see the bemusement of Jack Teagarden among jazz colleagues on the same stage in "Jazz on a Summer's Day." So there's nothing severely unorthodox about the tack the Indy Jazz Fest has taken, though the course needs to be corrected. As Brown's set neared the end, I was sure it was time to leave.

[Photo by Rob Ambrose]