Lizz Wright had
the sold-out Harro East Ballroom crowd in the
palm of her hand Monday night. Maybe it was because, with the room’s large
windows, there is no way to turn the house lights off while it’s still light
outside. She could see the audience, so Wright engaged with it throughout her
show. She said she hadn’t played two shows a night since she was in her 20’s,
and the band’s attitude toward the second set was “let’s just scrape the bottom
and see what’s left.”
There was a lot left. Wright’s voice is gorgeously smoky and
her stage movements, gestures, and facial expressions are just right. She
performed songs from her recent album, “Freedom & Surrender,” and even
though they weren’t as familiar as her covers, they went over beautifully.
Between tunes, Wright spoke about what she was trying to say in the lyrics: the
stories mostly involved her upbringing in a strict church atmosphere with her
father, a minister.
But it was some of her personality-infused covers that got
the biggest responses from the audience. Her renditions of Neil Young’s “Old
Man” and Gladys Knight’s “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” (written by Gerry Goffin and Barry Goldberg) were definite crowd pleasers.
Over at Xerox Auditorium, the 16-piece Moscow Jazz
Orchestra walked onto the stage wearing suits with red, white, and blue-striped
ties. But that was nothing compared to the obvious immersion of the group’s
members in American jazz. Vladimir Putin may be doing some saber rattling, and
a new Cold War may be on the horizon, but the Moscow Jazz Orchestra is
as American as apple pie.
The Orchestra is led by Igor Butman
(who plays with his quartet Tuesday, 6 p.m. and 10 p.m., at Montage) and he was
every bit the showman. Like Benny Goodman or a leader from the classic big band
era, Butman would rise from the reed section and wind
his serpentine saxophone solos over and around the sound of the whole band. But
that’s not to say the group was retro in any way. The music ranged from a
composition based on a Russian folk song to an arrangement of Billy Strayhorn’s
“The Intimacy of the Blues” — the treatments were all contemporary.
Despite all of the fireworks on stages all around downtown
Rochester, there is a place for subtlety at the XRIJF. Mika Pohjola’s trio provided some of that Monday night
at the Lutheran Church. When the trio’s saxophonist took a solo, sometimes
the drummer would drop out completely. And when the drummer soloed there were
no pyrotechnics, just an exploration of the tune’s percussive possibilities.
A superb pianist, Pohjola played
some of his own tunes, including “Sleep,” based on a poem by a famous Finnish
writer. The trio ended the set with Ornette Coleman’s ‘Humpty Dumpty,” and even
that was not enough to stir things up.
Tuesday night, I’ll be
checking out Christine Tobin at Christ Church. Then I’ll head over to Kilbourn Hall to hear Nacka Forum.
This article appears in Jun 22-28, 2016.
Uh, I think the Moscow Jazz Orchestra’s ties were patterned after the red, white, and blue stripes of the Russian flag. (Everything in the world isn’t all about us.) Also, is the best thing you can think of to say about the MJO is that they sounded American? They were fantastic. The piece that took off from Rachmaninoff was my favorite.
Lizz Wright was a wonderful, engaging performer. But the sound system was so overwhelming that we could not understand the lyrics and thus missed almost completely the stories she was telling us. And Pedro Martinez’s sound system was awful. It is difficult to find a venue these days that allows us to appreciate the music. Tiresome is the word
Linda
You’re right, Bridget, but I suspect that those ties were a subtle way of referencing both Russia and the USA, just as their music did. Terrific concert all around, but for me the highlight was the pianist’s singing medley, effortlessly shifting from English to Spanish to Hebrew to French to a yodeling riff.