Jazz fest forges community links

As the 30th anniversary of the Detroit Jazz Festival wound down Monday night, a light rain was the first contrary note in a weekend of perfect weather. These four days of music were a reminder of how jazz serves as a common ether, a bond that creates community among the most diverse elements of society.

Friday night was one of the strongest Jazzfest opening nights in years. Pontiac's own Hank Jones, of the legendary Jones brothers, played an elegant set of spare, cool piano jazz.

He was followed by Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White. The virtuosos played an acoustic set that gave each player ample room for some amazing solos. Several of the numbers had the intriguing Latin flavor of Corea's earlier work.

On Saturday, Flint-born Dee Dee Bridgewater sizzled on the Carhartt stage, backed up by the Michigan State University Jazz Orchestra, conducted by primo bassist Rodney Whitaker.

In between swinging like Ella on songs like "Undecided" and giving "September Song" a smoky melancholy, the diva flirted with the young Spartans in the MSU big band as if it were 3 a.m. in a Manhattan jazz club, and they were major players.

The Soul Queen of New Orleans, Irma Thomas played her first Detroit gig in about 16 years and thrilled the crowd with her strong pipes and feisty patter.

Sunday wound up on the funky side of things, with Booker T Jones of Stax/Volt fame, preceded by Detroit's own Dennis "Scorpio" Coffey, whose wah-wah guitar helped propel Motown's Temptations into a more progressive sound in the late '70s.

Emotions ran high at the Lyman Woodard Tribute Organization on Saturday. The program was an homage to the late Hammond B3 whiz, a legend at the Frolic Showbar in the '60s, and included Rayse Biggs on trumpet, "Ju Ju" Johnson on saxophone, Steve Hunter on slide trombone, Diego Melendez on congas, Chris Codish on organ, Ron English on guitar and Leonard King on drums. Codish made the Hammond growl on Woodard's signature song, "Don't Stop the Groove," and English played stellar funk guitar.

On Sunday, the newly minted Detroit Jazz Festival Orchestra, under the direction of Count Basie band veteran Dennis Wilson, performed a program laced with blazing Basie classics and a notably sweet performance of Thad Jones' "A Child is Born" (a number his brother Hank performed Friday). Saxophonist Wayne Shorter offered his audience an adventure -- a wild, unpredictable ride expressed in atonal language, episodic structure, complex rhythms and overarching melodic lines reminiscent of tenor sax giant John Coltrane.

The intensity level on the Carhartt Stage shot up when trumpeter Marcus Belgrave came on with his All-Star Quintet, four musicians he introduced as "my family."

They were all musicians Belgrave has mentored, including pianist Geri Allen, bassist Bob Hurst, saxophonist DeSean Jones and drummer Karriem Riggins.

Belgrave and "family" delivered a steaming set of jolting rhythms and spicy harmonies.

Trumpeter Rayse Biggs also played with McKinfolks on Sunday (a gathering of the late pianist/composer Harold McKinney's friends and family), and, as soon as a golf cart could deliver him, on the Mack Avenue Pyramid stage for the Carolyn Striho-Rayse Biggs project. There he and the soulful rock singer/poet showed that a new age of collaboration may beat hand, with no purist judgments worrying anybody.

Harold McKinney's daughter Gayelynn is the drummer in Straight Ahead, and in the venerable Detroit band's set they paid tribute to McKinney with "Daddy's Song." Though the drummer likes to blend modern elements of rock and avant-garde jazz into her playing, here she hewed to a more swinging line in tribute to her father.

Vocalist Sheila Jordan announced during her set with the Tad Weed Trio on Sunday that she was "80 and a half," and while her top notes can be a bit dicey, her phrasing is so savvy and the middle voice so good that it was hard to believe her senior status.

The rain started coming down during clarinetist Eddie Daniels' tribute to Benny Goodman with the Wayne State University Big Band late Monday afternoon. But Daniels' warm tone and liquid phrases mesmerized the wet crowd into staying. Daniels had Goodman's swinging style down pat on such tunes as "Stompin' at the Savoy," and the Carhartt Amphitheatre rocked to the blend of his swooping clarinet and the driving sound of WSU's super band.

Monday's bass trio with John Clayton, Christian McBride and Rodney Whitaker was a special delight. Their basses became a jazz string trio expressing wit, elegance, lyrical flights and heady rhythms.

Jazz festival promoters said they would not have attendance figures until Tuesday, but the crowds seemed as thick as they were last year.

The big festival ended on a grand scale, with the premiere of John Clayton's "concerto grosso" for the Clayton Brothers Quintet and the Scott Gwinnell Jazz Orchestra. Clayton calls his new work, commissioned by the festival, "T.H.E. Family, Detroit." The initials stand for the three brothers Thad, Hank and Elvin Jones. Thad and Elvin, both deceased, played trumpet and drums, respectively.

Hank, 91, appeared with his trio at the festival on Friday night. Clayton's tribute, running about 30 minutes, plays out in three continuous sections. The first is a fire-balling, brass-laden remembrance of Thad Jones. The slow, almost hymnal middle section honors Hank. And the lights-out finale recalls the supercharged drumming of Elvin Jones.

The 2009 festival was fun and filled with phenomenally rewarding music. That it is entirely free, thanks to festival chairwoman Gretchen Carhartt Valade and the Jazz Festival's sponsors, in this economy, is just short of a miracle.

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