Roberta Piket began her
set at Hatch Hall, Friday night, with a kind of call and response between her
right hand and her left on the Steinway grand piano. The dialog ranged from
sparse melodies answered by blunt chords to lush clusters answered by pounding
bass. Eventually all of this morphed into “Monk’s Dream,” the first of many
Thelonious Monk tunes to be played at the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival.
It appeared to be a kind of warming up, getting those fingers — and her
sensibility — ready for the marathon to come.
When the tune ended, Piket peeked
into the piano to confirm what she’d suspected: “This is a first; I broke a
string,” she said. “It’s the jazz version of Pete Townshend.” Despite her
phenomenal talent, Piket had a refreshingly
down-to-earth rapport with the audience when she introduced compositions. Among
them were a beautiful rendition of “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise”; lesser-known
tunes by Marian McPartland; and works by her father, a (mostly) classical
composer, and her husband, a jazz drummer. Every one
was a tour-de-force.
Roberta Piket will not perform again during this year’s XRIJF. robertajazz.com
The most unique attributes of the Nordic group Yggdrasil are
the ethereal voice of the band’s singer, Eivør, and
the compositions of its leader, Kristian Blak. The
highlight of the group’s set at the Lutheran Church, Friday night,
was Eivør’s gorgeous vocals on Blak’s
musical interpretation of a Shakespearian sonnet.
Eivør’s voice soared with
effortless acrobatics reminiscent of Kate Bush, and on other tunes her vocal
vocabulary extended to bird-like sounds and Björk-like gyrations.
Dressed in black, topped with a red and white floor-length cape-like garment, Eivør had the presence of a blonde goddess, witch-like in
the most positive way.
When she left the stage, the band was considerably less
mystical, although the guitarist made interesting sounds with pedals and
electronics, not to mention occasionally bowing his guitar.
Yggdrasil won’t perform
again during this year’s XRIJF, but Eivør appears Saturday, June 24, with her own band
at the Lutheran Church (7:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.); and Blak performs
on piano at Hatch Hall on Sunday, June 25 (5:45 p.m. and 7:45 p.m.). Those
shows are $30, or you can use your Club Pass.
Early in her set at Kilbourn Hall, Tierney
Sutton mentioned that her band had been together for 25 years.
This is highly unusual in today’s jazz world, and Sutton’s band certainly had
an unusually high level of simpatico as a result. Sutton herself is more than a
singer; almost half of her contribution showcased the instrument that is her
voice in seemingly effortless, wordless scat-singing.
Having recently recorded an album of songs
associated with Sting, it was no surprise to hear her rendition of “Fields
of Gold” and “Every Breath You Take.” She introduced the latter as “the
ultimate stalker song” but said she preferred to think of it as a song dealing
with empty nesters who are happy that their kids are out on their own and are
still concerned about them.
Sutton’s set went far beyond Sting to the Miles Davis
catalog, with Bill Evans’ “Blue in Green” and three tunes from George and Ira
Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s “Porgy and Bess.” She
also displayed her vocal dexterity on the impossibly complicated lyrics of
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” and on
her wonderfully creative rendition of Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg’s
“Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.”
Tierney Sutton will not
perform again during this year’s XRIJF. tierneysutton.com.
Saturday night, I’m looking forward to hearing pianist
Billy Childs at Kilbourn Hall, the Scandinavian
singer Eivør at the Lutheran Church, and Gabriel Alegria Afro-Peruvian Sextet at Xerox Auditorium.
Check out the slideshow below for shots of Yggdrasil’s Friday night performance in the Lutheran Church.
[SLIDESHOW-1]
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2017.
