Distinctly of an older time, but modern.  Distinctly new, but rooted in the past.  It’s that back and forth between the generations where the Luke Malewicz Heritage Quartet made its home for its Chicago Jazz Fest appearance Saturday at the Jazz & Heritage Pavilion.  Born in Poland but relocated to the U.S. as he entered his teens, trombonist Luke Malewicz channeled the music of both lands, old and new.

Along with his Heritage Quartet of trumpeter Chad McCullough, drummer Jon Deitemyer and bassist Patrick Mulcahy, Malewicz adapted Polish-origin compositions like Magdalena Nazaretanka’s folk song “Polskie Kwiaty” and Michał Ogiński’s polonaise “Pożegnanie Ojczyzny” for a jazz quartet, mixing in modern pieces like the magnetic “Heathers” to return the music to the present tense.

Sometimes trading solos, but even better when working in concert, the trombone-trumpet duo of Malewicz and McCullough were voices that carried far.  And as a nice balance to keep things grounded, Mulcahy got his bass to hum the tune by way of creating an undercurrent, except for those times that Deitemyer utilized his drum set as the tool to push that undercurrent out front.

It was a real nice way to start out the day in the Jazz & Heritage Pavilion.

Every band has a switch.  No matter how prepared each individual musician comes to perform on a particular night, if that switch ain’t in the ‘on’ position, neither is the band.  Something will sound just a little bit off, just enough to get felt in the flow of energy between band and crowd.  For their afternoon performance at the Jazz & Heritage Pavilion, that switch got flipped on for the Nate Lepine Quartet.

Throughout, tenor saxophonist Lepine, alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella, bassist Clark Sommers and drummer Quin Kirchner maintained a controlled fury, streamlined to provide the fastest mainline from instrument to ear.  Whether trading solos or joining forces, the quartet hit a high intensity from the very first note.  But it wasn’t just about raw power.  At times they’d enter a state that possessed the alluring melodicism of Indo-jazz, but for this performance, the feet were incited to move not because of a groove, but because the quartet was lighting a fire under them.

Mazzarella isn’t the kind to learn how to swim during a solo.  He just adapts to breathe underwater so the solo can keep heading into deeper waters.  And it’s always surprising at that moment he breaks the water’s surface at the end.  Lepine, on the other hand, seems content to just shove the entire damn ocean out of his way if it gets in the way of the lyricism he’s got his mind set on.

There’s blues here, battered and broken, and its scars are what gives it character, like a map of its evolution over time.  Sommers and Kirchner traded blows on bass and drums like Hagler-Hearns, but, y’know, actually really enjoying the fight back and forth.  Their smiles and excitement for the interactions was infectious, and a primary ingredient to how the highly charged electricity of this performance was so easy to embrace.

This same quartet has a new album coming out September 30th.  It’s titled Quartet:Vortices, and if it sounds anything like their Chicago Jazz Fest performance, then I’m pretty much just gonna lift this entire column and paste it into my recommendation.  If you’re not much into that kind of deja vu, you can go right now and check out the album’s Bandcamp page (LINK) and give a listen to a couple of the album tracks set up for streaming.

There were times that Pharoah Sanders seemed to connect with the lifeblood of the universe.  That tranquil melody of “The Creator Has a Master Plan” and how Sanders’ sax parted the sea of dissonance on Karma or the rising tide of intensity on “Hum-Allah” and how Lonnie Liston Smith both spurred it on and tamed it by the way he wielded that melody… up to the point when Sanders lit the whole thing on fire for the gigantic climax before the gentle comedown.  It was so full of power, resonating like crazy in all directions, and all of it was as easy to accept as inhaling the air surrounding us all.  The sextet Magic Carpet tapped into Sanders’ source and they didn’t turn it off for the entirety of their Saturday Chicago Jazz Festival performance at the Von Freeman Pavilion.

But while this music resonates with that lifeblood energy of Pharoah Sanders, the way Magic Carpet expresses it is quite different.  A far more relevant comparison would be the geographic influence crossfading of Goran Kajfeš, and how time and distance induce no limitations on the span of his music.  Magic Carpet wavers hypnotically between Indo-jazz, funk, soul jazz, reggae, Afro-jazz and Middle East folk music, and despite the many influences, the group achieves a unison that brings the most tuneful, enchanting music.  But make no mistake, this music grooves hard, and while it’s plenty easy to just kick back and let it wash over you, the impulse to move the feet is gonna be tough to deny.

Fred Jackson Jr. is on alto and soprano saxophones, Timuel “Cream” Jones on guitar, Makaya McCraven on drums, Ryan Mayer with the percussion, Parish Hicks on electric bass and Tracy King with vocals and dance.  For this performance, everybody stood out from the crowd on more than one occasion… individual voices were heard loud and clear even in the seamless group dynamic.  But on a personal note, I was absolutely thrilled with Tracy King’s contributions.  Her vocals came into play only occasionally, but they were heartfelt and full of warmth and energy and sincerity… actually, not unlike Leon Thomas’s on Karma.  But it was her dance that totally set things off.  King dances like so much of this music makes me feel inside.  I know I can’t be the only one who has all these emotions that get bottled up by the joyfulness of all this music we encounter, and to actually see someone physically expressing what I feel inside was a massively cathartic experience.  With some notable exceptions, if a music performance brings on dancers, I just view it as a distraction from the music.  When King briefly left the stage during a song, I felt the air go out of my heart.  Just outstanding.

The electricity in the Von Freeman Pavilion that day was palpable.  It flowed from the stage to the back of the room and the tides carried it right on home.

Here’s some of what went down…

I am certain that this will not be the only time this band sees print on this site.

If they could bottle this show up, it’d get served in bars all across this country.

James Sanders Proyecto Libre put on a powerful show at the Von Freeman Pavilion.  Along with Sanders and his violin were saxophonist Ed Wilkerson, the double bass duo of Harrison Bankhead and Joshua Abrams and the double percussion duo of drummer Avreeayl Ra and Jean-Christophe Leroy, and together they were a band that lived in that moment between light and day.

When Wilkerson’s sax brewed intensely meditative passages, crying out languorously up to the sky, the haunting beauty of Bankhead’s and Abrams’ bass arco settled in over everything.  And when Sanders’ violin was streaking across the scene like lightning unbottled, it was Ra’s sympathetic cymbal crashes that kept things grounded… no different when Ra and Leroy drew some thunder of their own when Sanders’ violin settled into a state of tranquility.  This was a performance where the gentle comedowns of melody behaved as a sunrise quietly dispelling the long night’s madness.

But it wasn’t all moody intensity.  The encore, a Sanders alternate take on Orquesta Aragon‘s classic Cuban tune “Pare Cochero” spurred much of the crowd out of their seats and onto the dance floor, roped into the playful groove and inviting melody.

Still plenty of time and plenty of performances before this year’s Chicago Jazz Fest wrap on Sunday evening, but I already know this is gonna be one of the shows that leaves the biggest imprint on my memory.

Night

Yes, you come to the Chicago Jazz Festival for the music.  But the festival is much more than that.  It has roots in the City of Chicago as much as the City branches out to become a part of the festival, too.  They are interwoven into the same entity, and it’s one reason why I love to head way out to the back of the lawn area and see and hear both at the same time.

It looks like this…

Those musicians you see off in the distance are Orbert Davis and his ensemble.

Davis, this year’s festival artist-in-residence, performed his new commission “Soul Migration,” giving sonic form to the motion of six million African Americans leaving the South behind and, some, making Chicago their new home.  And of everything they carried to a new place, music was one.  Davis’s sprawling work holds hands with Natalie Moore’s “The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago & American Segregation” and Timuel Black’s “Bridges of Memory,” two books that hit the same theme.

This isn’t the first time Davis has managed to encapsulate the sense of a City through the lens of an event.  His 2011 release DuSable to Obama: Chicago’s Black Metropolis is a captivating portrayal of the City through the timeline of its music up to the event of President Obama’s inauguration.  It’s the kind of thing that incites the act of revisiting memories while etching new ones into the music of today.

Davis’s piece didn’t sit still.  It hit any number of sounds, from contemporary fusion to straight-ahead old-school and new, to spoken word and deep into the melting pot of all those forms of expression as one.  There was a moment, when vibraphonist Joel Ross was a voice all alone in the room, tranquil but resonating powerfully, and it was not difficult to imagine a person new to Chicago, behind them a terrible ordeal and ahead an uncertain future, as they sit in their windowsill and look out over the city as the first winter snow begins to fall, lightly, hypnotically, bringing a hush across the neighborhood.  That’s what I’m going to remember of this performance.

Day

With the sun still making its ascent, I strolled into Millennium Park.  This was happening earlier than I’d intended.  But when I realized I had forgotten to stock the hotel room with Irish Cream to go with my morning coffee, off I went into the City to resolve that tragic situation.  God bless Chicago and it’s greasy spoon diners that serve alcohol at all hours.  So, after my morning coffee and some chorizo & eggs, I decided to head up to the park and walk around.  Grant Park is now Millennium Park, and all the open fields and train yards I recall from my teenage years have been replaced with a giant silver bean and climbing walls and lots of beautiful gardens, and so I have lots of exploring to do.  But then I hear the sound of horns and saxophones coming from Pritzker Pavilion, and there is no feeling quite like walking into a park in the morning and being greeted by the sound of lovely harmonies.  I headed on over, no expectations, but thinking I’d sit for a minute before my park adventure began.  It was a large ensemble getting in some practice.  I figure, hell, I’ll get up close to the stage and take a couple photos, maybe tweet ’em out or something.  I zoom in on two of the musicians who are working through their parts, and that’s when I realize, good god, that’s Ron Miles and Curtis Fowlkes I’m looking at.

I’m gonna spare you a very long-winded, long-form piece about my love for the Bill Frisell album Quartet, but both Miles and Fowlkes round out half of the quartet that created that album… so, I’m a little starstruck at this point.  That’s when this lady steps into the frame, obstructing my shot, and I’m thinking, c’mon lady, get out of the way… I’m trying to take a couple photos of two of my favorite musicians.  “Lady,” as it turns out, is Carla Bley, and that’s when I realized I’m watching the Liberation Music Orchestra warm up for the evening’s show.

This is what they sounded like…

I never got to go on my Millennium Park adventure, which is a disappointment pretty easy to ignore when I had the best morning ever listening to the LMO “practice,” which, in a way, made it even better.  Hearing the false starts and the interrupted takes, it made it much easier to live in the moment of the music, to realize that the beautiful music I’m hearing could truly end in the very next second, and that the reliance on a song having a certain, expected duration is something that can’t, in fact, be relied upon and there’s no way to let your guard down.  It was a nice reminder of one way that live music can perform magic in ways that albums never can, that fascination of the unfinished, of the beauty in flaws.

It wasn’t long before I had to head over to the Von Freeman pavilion for the James Saunders Proyecto Libre show.