Jazz Fest Minutes

Jazz Fest Minutes: Singer-Songwriter Eric Lindell May 05, 2013

Singer-songwriter Eric Lindell’s music has a soulful quality that is redolent of New Orleans. But he grew up in Sonoma County, California. “I used to skateboard, and I still surf and all, and we wanted to start a skate-rock band — this is when I was about 15,” he says. ‘It was funny, I had a guitar, and the other guy was a better guitar player than me, so I got demoted to bass. So I played bass. I played a three-string bass for about a year. I just played the top string, you know. And the drummer, his mom played in a blues band. So we used to play in their garage on their equipment and just make a racket, you know, noise.” Lindell says that’s where it all started. “And I just really got from there into bands like, there was a band called Fishbone, when I was around that age, that I loved, and they kind of crossed all genres,” he says. “They did funk, soul, reggae, ska, all these things just kind of mixed in one, and I think to this day that it is something that has stuck with me.” And

Jazz Fest Minutes: Making Connections With Multi-Instrumentalist Nicholas Payton May 04, 2013

Nicholas Payton is one brilliant musician. He plays just about everything on the bandstand very well. He’s best known for his trumpet work but is also a dynamic keyboard player, and even manages to play superbly on both at the same time. In recent years Payton has added another tool to his kit: singing. “When I was around eleven years old I was singing in the Baptist church choir. I used to go to Austerlitz Baptist Church, Uptown. And that’s really where I started singing a lot and developed a love for it. But, you know, being so focused on being an instrumentalist I kind of really didn’t pay much deference to it. But, in recent years, and particularly because so many of the trumpet players that I love also sing, like Louis Armstrong — obviously that’s a big tradition here for most trumpet players to sing. It’s kind of just what everyone does.” Especially when they write their own lyrics. “I think the thing that really brought it back for me was I started writing tunes with lyrics,

Jazz Fest Minutes: 'One Mo’ Time' With Actor Vernel Bagneris May 03, 2013

The Show “One Mo’ Time” went from humble beginnings as a homemade New Orleans labor of love with a single scheduled performance to a worldwide theatrical sensation that ran for years. Its creator, New Orleans actor Vernel Bagneris, has loved the idea of putting on a show from way back. “Cousins of mine still laugh at the fact that they used to come over and I’d put on a show for them and play a little accordion and single a little bit with the few chords I knew on a piano and do plays and make them all do parts,” Bagneris remembers. Bagneris’ first professional theater experience came in the touring company of a show called “The Book of Job.” “Since you’re sitting on a bus or sitting in a van most of the time, I started writing ‘One Mo’ Time,’” he says. He’d have music like old Bessie Smith songs playing, “And I also noticed the interest from other people in the music.” “And I’d say, ‘Oh, listen to this one!’ And they would, and they’d really get a kick out of it, and I thought, you

Jazz Fest Minutes: Lessons Learned With Trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis May 02, 2013

Trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis got a good lesson and lasting influence out of a teenage attempt to hornswoggle a new trombone from older brother Wynton. The lesson and the influence came in the form of a recording by trombone great J.J. Johnson. “Wynton gave me the record and he said, ‘If you learn one of these solos I’ll buy you a new horn.’ And it was, like, late J.J. from, it was called ‘Proof Positive.’ It one of the premier modern jazz trombone records, and there was no possibility. And that’s kind of where Wynton is. He gives you something, he knows it’s not possible you’re going to learn one of these. Man, I used to listen at that record. I learned the whole record, but I didn’t have the facilities, so — he had one ballad on the record. It was ‘My Funny Valentine.’ I said, ‘Okay, I can learn this one.’ But he had a cadenza at the very end. It was just like — ’Yeah, give me a break!’” He got everything but the cadenza at the end. But that’s when he started dabbling in electronics

Jazz Fest Minutes: Saxophonist And Astral Project Founder Tony Dagradi Apr 29, 2013

Saxophonist and Astral Project founder Tony Dagradi grew up in Summit, New Jersey. By high school he knew what he wanted to do: play jazz. “It was almost as if I didn’t have a choice,” he says. “I didn’t think about, well, how much money am I going to make or how do I get a gig. I was just — all I wanted to do was play.” After a couple of years at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Dagradi entered an intense period of jazz rehearsal and listening. “That was it for me. When I started listening to Coltrane I couldn’t listen to anybody else. So, I mean, I really just listened to him pretty nonstop for a couple of years. And I would veer off and listen to other saxophonists, you know, Sonny and Dexter and Charlie Parker and everybody else, but nobody hit me like Coltrane did,” he says. “A lot of what I do as a saxophonist comes out of that influence.” Another big Boston influence on Dagradi was New Orleans native trumpeter and bandleader Stanton Davis. “He was actually probably the

Jazz Fest Minutes: Banjoman Don Vappie Apr 26, 2013

Don Vappie grew up in New Orleans with a yen for music he just couldn’t explain. “My earliest memory, it must have been second grade, I always wanted to be a musician,” Vappie says. “I have no idea why, but that’s what I wanted to do.” Unless it was those records. “I had a Decca record player, you know, the little box you could carry around? And my grandmother gave me a 78. It was ‘A Tisket, A Tasket.’ And on the flip side it was Chick Webb doing ‘Liza (Let the Clouds Roll Away)’ — which was my favorite back then. I thought that was just fantastic.” Vappie enjoyed his mother’s support early on in his quest for music. And, ultimately, that of his father. “After my father died, I think he died in the late ‘80s, my mother expressed to me that he never thought... He never agreed with what I was doing, initially. And she would speak up for me and say, ‘Well, you know, this is something that’s in him. You’ve got to let him do it.’ So she sort of took up for me. But, you know, before he died,

Jazz Fest Minutes: Jazz Master Eddie Palmieri Apr 25, 2013

National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Eddie Palmieri is a great pianist, composer and bandleader. However, in his early teens Palmieri developed a yen to play timbales in his piano-playing older brother’s band. “When Tito Puente made the instrument so popular I was a young man, and by 13 I started to play timbales. I wanted to be my brother’s drummer,” Palmieri said. “That didn’t work out; my mother bought me a metal case that weighed more than maybe two or three pairs of timbales, and then she would wait for my uncle to hit the horn in his car, the station wagon, to go to the gigs, and when I would pick up that box, it was made out of tin, you know, heavy, and when I used to pick it up she would tell me in Spanish, ‘Don’t you see how beautiful your brother looks when he goes to work, and he doesn’t have to carry an instrument? When will you learn, Eduardo?’ And I said, ‘I’m learning Ma! I’m learning!’” Palmieri went back to the piano at 15 and has never left. His mother, it

Jazz Fest Minutes: Listening And Learning With Germaine Bazzle Apr 24, 2013

Great New Orleans jazz singer Germaine Bazzle’s formal music education began at the Xavier Junior School of Music under the tutelage of the accomplished and very demanding Sister Mary Latitia. “She is the one, when you hear that little sound that I make, she is the one that demonstrated that to the orchestra when we were playing as she wanted something done,” Bazzle explained. “She wanted to show the trumpets or trombones, the brass people, how to do a certain thing. And when I started doing gigs I found myself doing that.” Bazzle’s jazz education, though, started at home. “My brother had a group of friends who were musicians, like Johnny Fernandez, Bill Fischer, you know, those guys. And those guys would come to our house to listen to music. It was the weirdest thing — five or six guys, sitting in the living room and just recording after recording is being played,” she said. “Well — boys! So, I’m sitting in the room with them, you know. I mean, that was nice. I was also interested in

Jazz Fest Minutes: Trumpeter And Vocalist Gregg Stafford Apr 23, 2013

Great New Orleans trumpeter and vocalist Gregg Stafford spent much of his childhood in the Central City neighborhood. He saw lots of parades, often sang in church, and developed a real love of music. When it came time for high school, Stafford had the chance to join the school band — if his mother approved. So he told her, “I don’t have an elective at the moment, so the band instructor asked me, would I be interested in music? ‘Oh no, no, no, no; I don’t have no money to pay for no horn, so you can just scratch that,’” she told him. But the band instructor told Stafford that he would be willing to give him an instrument. So Stafford told his mom that. “She said, ‘No, I’m not going to sign anything like that because if you lose it I’m still responsible for the instrument.’ So I was a little upset. I went back to school the next morning. So the band instructor, he was standing in the office waiting for me. I said, ‘Well look, my mother don’t want to sign the papers.’ He says, ‘Well, why

Jazz Fest Minutes: Hitting The High Notes With Saxophonist Joshua Redman Apr 22, 2013

Saxophonist Joshua Redman grew up in Berkeley, California, a very high achiever academically who turned to music for fun. “I loved music, and I loved listening to it and I loved playing it, but I wasn’t serious about it. Music was kind of an escape, it was kind of a relief for me from the more rigorous aspects, the more studious aspects, of academics,” Redman says. “That was kind of how I let myself go and have fun.” Redman started clarinet in the fourth grade and switched to tenor sax in the fifth. He loved blues, rock, funk, jazz and, thanks to his dancer mom, Indian and Indonesian music. “My mom was an incredible mom, and gave me all the love and support a child could ask for,” he says. “But materially, financially, I grew up without a lot of means, and my mom was on welfare the time I was growing up. So, I kind of saw academics, and academic success, in a certain way as a possible way to achieve some sort of... just stability.” It came time for college, and Redman headed east to

Jazz Fest Minutes: Pianist And Composer George Cables Apr 19, 2013

George Cables is a superb pianist, an outstanding composer with a real gift for melody. He was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Queens. He started piano in grade school, and liked taking traditional lessons and studying classical music right away. “I did like the piano. I had a crush on my piano teacher,” he said. Cables studied classical piano at the Manhattan High School for the Performing Arts, and found a way to incorporate jazz into his afternoon commute home. “So I had to take a subway and then a bus. So I get off the subway to get the bus, and the pizza joint there — I’d stop in and there was a jukebox in this place,” he said. “The only thing that was remotely close to jazz was a Wynton Kelly cut called ‘Little Tracy’, with a little calypso. And I loved that; I played it every day.” As soon as Cables turned 18 years old, and a little before, he would go to The Five Spot, a lot. “I could see Thelonious Monk, and in those days he was there maybe four or five or six months at a time,”

Jazz Fest Minutes: Johnette Downing's Call To Perform Apr 18, 2013

Johnette Downing is an award-winning singer and songwriter of music for kids. A New Orleans native, and the daughter of musical parents, Downing felt the call to perform since she was in kindergarten. “In fact, my first performance I was in kindergarten,” Downing said. “I sang in the school play. And I was very shy, and the teacher thought, ‘Well, there’s no way this child is going to get up and sing.’ So she called my mother, she said, ‘She wanted to be the lead,’ and my mother said, ‘She’ll do it, she can do it.’ And I did. I was really shy, but I could sing in front of a whole audience.” Downing said her parents exposed their kids to music at an early age because they loved music so much. “They would bring us down to the French Quarter and we would stand in the doorways of jazz clubs and listen to Dixieland Jazz,” she said. “I mean, we’re so fortunate to live in Louisiana and have all this music right here in our front yard.” Around the seventh grade Downing wanted a guitar, so her

Jazz Fest Minutes: A Musical Journey With George Duke Apr 17, 2013

George Duke is one of the most sought-after and accomplished players and producers in music. He grew up in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. “My mom used to talk me to see ballet, classical concerts, gospel concerts, jazz concerts — and the thing that stuck was I got a chance to hear and see Duke Ellington live. The Big Band,” Duke remembered. “And that kind of messed me up. I was like four-and-a-half years old or so, and it really affected me. Maybe because his name was Duke? I really don’t know. I didn’t understand the music, but it made me feel good and I told my mom, ‘I don’t know what he’s doing, but I want to do that.’” Duke started piano at seven-years-old, and later took up trombone. While in college at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music he started working at a club called The Half Note. “Who walks in one Sunday afternoon but a guy named Al Jarreau. A young Al Jarreau started singing. He just tore the place up. We began working together in this place for about two

Jazz Fest Minutes: Topsy Chapman And Solid Harmony Apr 16, 2013

Topsy Chapman is one of New Orleans’ most engaging and soulful singers. Her mix of gospel, blues, traditional jazz and swing proves both captivating and uplifting. And, when Topsy Chapman blends her fine voice with those of her daughters Jolynda Phillips and Yolanda Windsay in the vocal trio Solid Harmony, it’s magic. “What happened was, when I did my performances, I would ask before practice if it was okay if I brought my two daughters in and they could hear what the group sounded like. And Snug Harbor was one that always said yes, so we did most of our performances there,” Champman said. “When I do a performance at Snug Harbor I always ask the girls to come and sit in with me. And then it just caught on from there. People started calling sand said, ‘Listen, I’d like to have you and the girls up. We heard you at Snug Harbor, we heard about you at Snug Harbor.’” Chapman says that started in the late 1990s. Their first time out as a group was in Japan in 1998. The group’s solid

Jazz Fest Minutes: Wayne Shorter — Connecting With The Beat Apr 15, 2013

Wayne Shorter is one of the top saxophonists and composers in jazz. It was, strangely enough, getting caught at 15 years old playing hooky from school that put him on a path into music. His punishment: enrollment in the music theory course at his Newark, NJ arts high school. “The teacher was a disciplinarian, and before they sentenced me they asked me ‘Where do you go when you play hooky?’ And I said to the theater; one day they had a double feature film and a stage show,” Shorter said. “They said ‘You like stage shows, huh? Alright... You kinda like the music, you like what’s going on on the stage, okay.’ They picked up the phone and called Achilles D’Amico, the teacher there and put me in his class.” You know, this is like signs, reading signs,” he said. “The first thing he said in that class was, he had three records on his desk, and he said, ‘Music is going to go in these three directions. He held up the first record, it was a Latin record, with this singer from Peru, Yma Sumac,

Jazz Fest Minutes: The Legendary Del McCoury Apr 12, 2013

Bluegrass Hall of Famer Del McCoury’s folks came from the mountains of western North Carolina, but he grew up on a farm in York County, Pennsylvania, less than an hour’s drive from Baltimore. “My dad and my older brother listened to the Grand Ol’ Opry every Saturday night,” McCoury said. It was before television, in the middle- to late-1940s. “At a young age I heard Earl Scruggs, and that’s what got me into music.” McCoury had already learned a little guitar from his older brother — who had learned it from their mother — when, inspired by Earl Scruggs, he took up banjo. And, thanks to his dad, soon acquired one. “My dad knew a guy who had an old banjo; he didn’t play it, and so he borrowed it from that guy because I kept talking to my dad about getting me one. And he said, ‘I know a guy who’s got one. He don’t even play it.’ And, after a while, that guy started owing him money for something, so we got a banjo out of the deal,” he said. “It wasn’t a good one, but you could play it.”

Jazz Fest Minutes: Words and Music with Donald Harrison, Jr. Apr 11, 2013

Saxophonist, composer and Mardi Gras Indian Chief Donald Harrison, Jr . started learning about Mardi Gras Indian culture firsthand and early. “The first time I put on a suit was at two years old for the Creole Wild West," Harrison said. I was a little chief of the Creole Wild West. I had on a dark blue and white suit my father made for me. I remember them running and going fast up and down in feathers, flying and singing.” He says his mother talks about how he used to play drums on his crib. "They should have gotten me a drum set instead of a saxophone," he said. "I think I have a natural affinity for rhythm.” And a thorough grounding in the powerful connection between music and dance. “One of the great things was that my mother used to make us dance the popular dances. So some kind of way that got into my psyche that you should also play music. When I started to play, it makes you want to dance.” Harrison started playing alto sax at 10 years old, and made a couple of key musical

Jazz Fest Minutes: David Egan — 20 Years of Trouble Apr 10, 2013

David Eagan is one of Louisiana's most recorded songwriters. A short list of artists covering his tunes includes Irma Thomas, Marcia Ball, Solomon Burke, Etta James, Joe Cocker, Mavis Staples, John Mayall and Johnny Adams. Egan grew up in the music-rich environments of 1960s Shreveport. "You had the whole chitlins-circuit thing," Egan said. "You had the Bossier Strip, which was, of course, somebody's going to write a great book about that someday; just a hotbed of neon and music and vice. All those clubs and everything. And you had the Louisiana Hayride." And, in David Eagan's family, a strong classical influence. "I grew up in a symphony family, and we had guest conductors and ballet dancers and guitar troupes staying at our house," he remembered. "Cast parties until four o'clock in the morning on school nights. An atmosphere of tolerance and a lot of eccentric people coming through the household. It was a lot of fun." Eagan started writing songs in the fifth grade and has never

Jazz Fest Minutes: C.J. Chenier Keeps It Red Hot Apr 09, 2013

C.J. Chenier is the son of Zydeco legend Clifton Chenier . "I didn't know to what magnitude my dad's popularity was, but I knew he played music and because he played music I wanted to play music," Chenier said. C.J. took a few piano lessons, messed around with guitar a little bit, and by the fourth grade was ready to try a horn. "The only instrument I knew about was a trombone because I saw this movie 76 Trombones ," he said. "So that's really the only instrument I knew about. And I told my mom, I said I want to play the trombone, and she's like, no, you've got to play saxophone because your daddy's got a saxophone in his band. And I didn't know what a saxophone was." It turned out to be a very good choice. "My mom must have had a foresight, because me and the saxophone became one real quick, you know, it was like I adapted to it real fast." C.J. wanted to play music full time, but couldn't make a living doing that in his hometown of Port Arthur, Texas. So, after finishing high school,

Jazz Fest Minutes: A Conversation With Dianne Reeves Apr 08, 2013

Dianne Reeves is one of the finest jazz singers on the planet. Born in Detroit, she grew up in Denver in a family full of musicians. "There's a lot of musicians in my family," Reeves said. "My uncle is a bassist and he was with the symphony for many years, as well as a jazz bassist. A couple of great aunts were performers, and then I have another cousin who actually produced a lot of my records, George Duke. So music was very much part of the family." Reeves started singing seriously in junior high, taking vocal lessons and joining the school choir. "I remember walking down the hall in passing period in school and thinking I've always heard 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket,' but I am. Because I loved it. I loved how singing made me feel and I loved how I could communicate with people on this other level that I couldn't define." For many years now Reeves has enjoyed a strong appreciation for, and association with, New Orleans musicians. "I remember one time I was doing this thing

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