Monk Tributes, Innovative Pairings Give Spark to Hyde Park Jazz Fest
Sep. 27, 2017
The 11th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival, populating a dozen varied venues amid the picturesque splendor of the festival’s namesake neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, proved as stimulating as ever this time around (Sept. 23–24). Programmed for the sixth year by the astute, visionary Kate Dumbleton—and assisted by music manager Carolyn Albritton, managing director Olivia Junell and stalwart new operations manager Dave Rempis, among others—the HPJF is unlike any other festival in its intensity and pace. Its principal hit: an offering of 30 presentations between 1 p.m. and midnight on Sept. 23.
The overlaps of concerts are carefully timed so that it is possible to catch portions of some simultaneous sets if you are a fast walker, but completists will be frustrated.
Despite the out of town stars that brightened the diverse bill (including Bill McHenry and Andrew Cyrille, Amina Claudine Myers, Jeremy Pelt, Oliver Lake, Joe Locke and Warren Wolf, plus the Malian musicians who collaborated with Nicole Mitchell), it was the local duo of Nick Mazzarella and Tomeka Reid at DuSable Museum that most impressed. Altoist Mazzarella was last heard in such a context at the HPJF alongside one of the festival’s regular fixtures, drummer Dana Hall. (In fact, Hall, performing solo, preceded Mazzarella’s set with cellist Reid on the DuSable stage.)
Under cascading drapes and soft lighting, the unlikely twosome (alto/cello duos are as rare as the teeth of hens) stationed themselves about six feet away from each other. An infrequent meeting for them, the two had collaborated two and a half years prior to record the audacious Signaling for the legendary Chicago progressive imprint Nessa.
An acknowledged precedent and inspiration for the project was the nexus between cellist Abdul Wadud and saxophonist Julius Hemphill. A listen to Hemphill and Wadud’s Live In New York (1976) bears comparison to Signaling, which opens with a baleful paean to these predecessors called “Blues For Julius And Abdul,” during which the bluesy melisma of the alto conjures the impassioned feelings that saxophonists Charlie Mariano and Ron Aspery used to generate.
The duo at DuSable let the music do the talking and skipped announcements.
Mazzarella’s keen, preaching tone owes its foremost debt to Ornette Coleman and, to a lesser extent, Henry Threadgill, but he has smelted his influences into a compelling new alloy. Though his conception was suggestive of Hemphill in this context, Mazzarella’s approach was less scrappy than its antecedent, more measured, streamlined and virtuosic when the moment called. He played with relaxed concentration, smoothing out his thick beard or manipulating a string of bells or dropping them to the floor as a rhythmical comp to Reid’s excursions.
The latter’s instrument demands greater movement, and her long, wiry arms and sharp elbows made busy atop the cello’s fingerboard. On “The Ancestors Speak,” a track from Signaling, it sounded as though Reid (whose primary influences are Wadud and Threadgill sidewoman Diedre Murray) had prepared her cello with alligator clips on each string, an effect that she replicated at the DuSable Museum. The resulting timbre recalled the ominous sounds Charles Mingus used to elicit on bass. Yet the live set, as with the bulk of the new album, was wholly improvised. You would have been forgiven for assuming these were set pieces, such was the knowing timing between the two.
Both musicians maintained a high level of invention during their 60 minutes on stage. Mazarella gamely approximated or counterbalanced the whinnying velocity of Reid’s arco work with a succession of vented trills, pecky squawks and bird-like peeps. They reined their bluesy pas de deux outro to a barely audible volume, then ended on the stroke of 5:30 p.m., despite having no ability to monitor the time while playing.