First up for me Saturday at the 2013 Jazz Fest was the Halie Loren Trio at the Rochester Club. It’s
an interesting venue (food and jazz at the same time!), and Loren’s trio fit
the space well. The act created music that was more fit for
the background of a conversation than it was being at the forefront. Loren’s
voice was soft, just shy of sultry, as she and the trio created what was
essentially ambient music for the room. It was nothing too exciting, or too
powerful.
Also worth nothing was the fact that her trio — keys, vocals,
and bass — lacked anything strongly percussive, and you could tell as various
members took turns clapping or hitting their instruments to try to keep some kind
of rhythmic backbone going. Not the strongest start to the night.
Next up was YolanDa Brown at
Christ Church as part of the Made in the UK Series. I only got to catch one
song before I had to bounce to the next show (it didn’t help that she burnt
stage time making the audience members introduce themselves to the people sitting
on the right and left of them), but the opener was lyrical in that way that
saxophone playing should be: the instrument acted like a human voice, expressively
talking to the audience. I’m still trying to figure out why she had an iPad on stage, but that mystery will have to go unsolved
for another day.
In certain musical circles, there’s a stigma against the
acoustic guitar. For some reason it can appear that if a player is skilled
enough he or she will eventually “graduate up” and learn to shred on the acoustic’s electrical brother. That’s a bias that Loren and Mark easily dismissed Saturday
at the Little Theatre.
The duo was the runaway winner of the acts I saw Saturday
night, and was more a one-bodied, guitar-playing monstrosity with four arms
than it was two people up on the stage. The duo was cool and collected, making the onslaught of acoustic-y goodness look and sound so easy.
Moving from Western melodies to some gypsy jazz a la Stephane Wrembel’s silly Paris
song, the duo played in beautiful unison, perfectly passing note runs between
one another to the point where it was sometimes hard to tell where one’s playing
stopped and the other’s began. Simply
great stuff. Who needs electric guitars, anyway?
Last up I shuffled (it’s almost like I planned that) off to
catch Shuffle Demons under the Unity
Health System Big Tent. When I got there I was surprised to find that the crowd
was sparse. The Demons came out dressed to impress, but failed to flatter.
The band’s cover opener was a disjointed arrangement, and its original songs
showed some promise as a tight horn-driven unit before being ruined by subpar
vocals and simple, needless lyrics. It was almost like the group couldn’t
decide what it wanted to be, and opted for an all-over-the-board approach that
wasn’t doing any of it justice.
Even the awesomely dressed pharaoh string-bass player
couldn’t save the show. Shuffle Demons will be back Sunday night on the Jazz Street
Stage, but your time is probably better spent shuffling off to see someone
else. Nothing demonic here, folks.
Sunday I plan to check out Mike Brignola
at the Rochester Club and BeauSoleil at Harro East. What will you be seeing?
This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2013.
