Headliners Include Diana Krall, Wayne Shorter, Bobby McFerrin, Bob James & David Sanborn, George Benson, Dave Holland’s PRISM, Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club, Joe Lovano & Dave Douglas: Sound Prints; Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, Gregory Porter, and sooo. many more.

More: 
Monterey Jazz Festival Website

Photo: Stephen Laufer

By Jeff Dayton-Johnson | KUSP – The festival is over, I’ve had a couple of decent nights’ sleep. I can’t quite shake the MJF blogging jones, so I am compelled to blog one final time.The conventional thing to do at this point is to draw up a list of the best moments of the festival. I’d rather share a list of my regrets.

1. Showing Up Late: I regret showing up in the middle of a lot of shows, but I will forever kick myself for missing the first part of Artist-in-Residence Ambrose Akinmusire’s Friday night performance at Dizzy’s Den. Akinmusire showed up subsequently with the Next Generation Jazz Orchestra (of which he is an alum, and with whom he sounded generous and great) and with the closing Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour all-star blowing session. But in no context was he as incendiary, in the purest Coltrane emotional-politico-spiritual-aesthetic sense, as with his own group. The fragment of his show that I saw was the best thing I saw at the festival.
2. Leaving Early: I regret having to leave early from many shows, but none more so than the Saturday Night Club set by trumpeter Christian Scott’s incredible quintet and pianist Tigran Hamasyan’s trio set at the Coffee House Gallery Sunday night.  Both were smokin’ – like a lot of the shows, in fact – but with an innovative vibe, stretching the music in unusual ways. I was transfixed, in both cases – but I had to move on.
3. Questions Unasked: While I’m on the subject of Ambrose Akinmusire (and I was), I should acknowledge that the trumpeter graciously consented to an impromptu KUSP interview, which you can hear elsewhere on this website. The whole thing lasted less than five minutes and I have so many questions I wish I had put to him. Let’s hope there’s a next time.
4. Shows Unseen: I was within a hundred yards of these performances, and I couldn’t make it for even a second: Mulgrew Miller, Gerald Clayton, the Cal Tjader tribute, the Ninety Miles Band, Jack DeJohnette with Rudresh Mahathappa. How the hell is that possible?
5. Beers Undrunk: I wish I had ordered a couple more of those Brother Thelonious ales that were on sale. They seem kind of an extravagance – the price, the calories, the alcohol content. But in the context of the festival, it seems fitting to quaff a couple. And I did. Why didn’t I quaff more? (Partly, I suppose, because the blog would have been even less intelligible than it was.)
6. Thanks Unexpressed: The extended family of KUSP crew – on-air personalities, technical folks, volunteers, new media gang – and the MJF staff who helped us out were so great. It was a blast. Thanks! Looks like I don’t have to regret not thanking them for their camaraderie and help after all.

Jeff Dayton-Johnson is a featured music reviewer at KUSP and a regular contributer to All About Jazz.

Dee Dee Bridgewater, Bennie Green, Lewis Nash, Christian McBride (partial), Sunday night. Photo: Stephen Laufer / KUSP.

By JeffDayton-Johnson | KUSP – Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour- a somewhat cumbersome name for a group, no? – closed out the proceedings from the Jimmy Lyons Arena Stage Sunday. Vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater, bassist and leader Christian McBride, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, tenor saxophonist Chris Potter, pianist Benny Green and drummer Lewis Nash appeared together and in various smaller combinations for a somewhat laid-back blowing session.

Bridgewater and McBride began as a duet, with the Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing,” and the set list included Bobby Hutcherson’s “Highway 1″ and Horace Silver’s “Filthy McNasty.” Akinmusire’s “Henya” (a standout track from his When the Heart Emerges Glistening), a tender ballad, was an emotional highlight. “All of Me” closed the set.

Photos: Stephen Laufer / KUSP

Jack DeJohnette and Bill Frisell on Sunday might at MJF. Photo: Stephen Laufer

Guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Jack DeJohnette were all over the festival this year, in various musical configurations. It is only fitting, then, that one of the last performances of the evening should be a duet by the pair at Dizzy’s Den. A guitar-drums duo may sound a little spare in principle, but in practice both these musicians have distinct technical styles that seem to multiply the number of musicians on stage: Frisell by means of various electronic effects, DeJohnette by dint of his polyrhythmic drumming (not to mention his doubling on piano).

.
Photo: Stephen Laufer / KUSP

By Jeff Dayton-Johnson | KUSP – Amidst a line-up featuring multiple performances by guitar jazz icons Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell, festival-goers might not have noticed that another giant of jazz guitar was on the premises: John Abercrombie. Abercrombie snuck into Monterey as the first performer at the B-3 Blowout on the Night Club stage (visible to our webcast viewers). The organ-trio format is at first blush a conservative one for an artist who has played in so many varied and adventurous settings; his long tenure with the cerebral ECM record label, moreover, seems far removed from the sweaty realm of the beloved chicken-shack organ sound.

No matter. Abercrombie was quite at home, and offered up his signature style: limpid, languid, clear lines, his solos stated in paragraphs rather than sentences. A sensitive reading of “Where Are You?”, inspired, the guitarist told us, by the Sonny Rollins version with guitarist Jim Hall, was particularly lovely; Abercrombie’s own “Ralph’s Piano Waltz” featured excellent solos by all trio members. Gary Versace on the organ was a fitting foil for Abercrombie. He’s capable of idiomatic soul-jazz (listen to him on the recent Kate McGarry album Girl Talk; for further evidence), but stretched to match Abercrombie’s lead when necessary.

In the Coffee House Gallery, Tigran Hamasyan‘s trio performed a set probably unlike any other heard at MJF this year. Hamasyan is an Armenian pianist, and 2006 winner of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. His 2011 Verve release A Fable; is worthy of much greater recognition: solo piano with vocals, effects and overdubbing, very much informed by the jazz mainstream (there’s a version of “Someday My Prince Will Come”), but also by traditional and classical Armenian music.

Much of Hamasyan’s Coffee House performance drew upon elements of the solo record: dreamy, beautiful Eastern European melodies, both Hamasyan’s voice and piano subject to surreal electronic treatment. But with the help of electric bass and drums, Hamasyan was able to add another musical ingredient: his avowed love of heavy metal music.

No one else is mixing up elements quite the way Hamasyan is – in fact, no one else is even in the same musical ballpark. But his trio’s set at the Coffee House, music of profound old-world beauty delivered with ludicrously exaggerated dynamic contrast, was entirely convincing.

Gregory Porter on the Monterey Jazz Festival's Night Club stage. Photo: Jeff Dayton-Johnson / KUSP

Gregory Porter’s Friday night performance was one of our highlights of the weekend. If you missed it, you’re in luck! We’ll be broadcasting his set tonight, starting at 7:40pm on 88.9 FM.

Listen to the full interview by the inimitable Robert Pollie, as it was broadcast on Robert’s show The 7th Avenue Project on September 23, 2012. An excerpt form that program is on the player below.

Ambrose Akinmusire on the Arena Stage, performing Sunday night with the 'Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour'. Photo: Stephen Laufer / KUSP

By Jeff Dayton-Johnson | KUSP – The last night of the festival is possibly more densely packed with difficult trade-offs than any time slot of the entire three days…

In the Night Club (visible to our webcast viewers starting at 7 p.m.), the B-3 Blowout promises deep satisfaction to aficionados of guitar and organ: John Abercrombie, Larry Goldings and Chester Thompson take the stage with their groups in turn.

Pat Metheny‘s Unity group (with Chris Potter on saxophone) leads off on the arena stage – starting even as I write.

Radio listeners will be treated to Gregory Porter‘s Night Club set (at 7:45 p.m.) and the Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour orchestra (featuring Ambrose Akinmusire and Dee Dee Bridgewater, among others) at 9 p.m.

Other choices abound: two sets of Pianist Tigran Hamasyan at the Coffee House Gallery is a pick of our own Jeff Dayton-Johnson; Jack DeJohnette and Bill Frisell in a rare duet at Dizzy’s Den, meanwhile, should nicely round out the pair’s generous appearances throughout the weekend.

Esperanza Spalding during the KUP interview. Photo: Stephen Laufer / KUSP

Interview by Brett Taylor and Geo Warner | KUSP – Esperanza Spalding spoke with KUSP’s Brett Taylor and Geo Warner following her performance on the arena stage about a wide range of topics, including the critical importance of good music on local radio!

Spalding’s latest record is called Radio Music Society, and the arena stage was dominated by a outsized boombox radio during her set; the band’s initial horn salvo was even fed through some kind of filter that sounded like a little transistor radio, only to blast forth subsequently in full glory. She explained to the audience the importance of each of the three words in the title.

What she would like, it seems, is that jazz could reclaim its place as the premier pop music and the premier dance music, as well as being the intellectually challenging and culturally relevant art form that it is today. Arguably, at the peak of the 1930s and 1940s big-band era was all of these things: all over the radio, providing the beat to young people’s dancing, and adored by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir all at the same time..

Spalding recognizes that to effect this change, the sound of jazz will need to change, too, and the music she and her band played demonstrated the direction it will need to go. “Black Gold” made a strong argument: the horns and the swing, but also the sweet soul and the funk. (In this regard, her project is like that of pianist Robert Glasper – last year’s MJF Artist-in-Residence, and whose latest record title – Black Radio – sounds a little like Esperanza’s, even if Glasper’s music goes in yet another direction.) Spalding closed with a rousing defense of the crucial importance of good music on the radio; needless to say, we could not more strenuously agree with her position.

Here’s hoping Spalding can bring this vision to fruition; in the meantime, you can already hear plenty of good music on the radio at KUSP 88.9 FM…

Photo" Stephen Laufer / KUSP

 Interview by Jeff Dayton-Johnson | KUSP – Tierney Sutton wowed the audience at the Night Club stage last night (a concert our kusp.org webcast viewers also saw).  This morning, she dropped by to talk with KUSP’s Jeff Dayton-Johnson about her ongoing project with the Turtle Island String Quartet, her planned album of Joni Mitchell material, the spiritual dimension of the pursuit of excellence, and the acts she’s looking forward to seeing today at MJF!