Jazz Fest Minutes

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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