The 2012 DC Jazz Festival landed amid a perfect storm. From the opening of The Hamilton—maybe the best thing ever to happen to the festival, but more on that later—and the reopening of the Howard Theatre to the increasing confidence and imagination of CapitalBop and the accession of Jazz at the Atlas to the proliferation of [...]
Saturday was the day of CapitalBop's 11-hour MegaFest at 629 New York Ave. NW. Unable to attend the full event, I instead stopped in every couple of hours to get a sense of it and enjoy the goings-on. Here are my impressions of each visit.
3:49 p.m. The setup here is pretty neat. It's a huge [...]
You've already met Alex Brown, our festival pick for this evening (midnight at Cashion's Eat Place, 1819 Columbia Road NW, Free). But there are even more big things happening over the weekend—especially tomorrow.
SATURDAY
There's always a rickety, homemade vibe to DIY projects and events—to some extent, that's the point. But it doesn't mean DIY can't be [...]
At the Kennedy Center's incandescent "Jazz Meets the Classics" concert on Monday, the Paquito D'Rivera quintet did a strong set of Latin takes on classical repertoire. Standing out in those arrangements was the band's 22-year-old piano player, Alex Brown, who switched back and forth between swing and conservatory stylings with such ease it was like [...]
Every year, you hear some grumbling about one aspect of the DC Jazz Festival from the circle of local jazz snobs of which, for better or worse, I'm a member. The complaint? The festival's repetitive programming.
As regular festivalgoers surely have noticed, there's a small coterie of musicians who have headlined the festival over and over [...]
Nobody will ever mistake Anat Cohen for any other clarinetist. She's got a full, round tone with a sensitive core that coasts over her accompaniment like a cork bobbing on the waves. That makes it sound lighthearted, which it assuredly can be, but always present is a certain inexpressible gravitas. That feeling, of course, is [...]
"Perfect" is a word you usually want to avoid in music reviews. That goes double for reviews of concerts, and triple for jazz concerts. As Artie Shaw (among others) observed, musicians who don't make mistakes aren't playing at the edge of their ability; they're not taking chances.
One could never accuse the Rodney Richardson Trio of [...]
Jazz in Washington just won't be the same without Rodney Richardson. D.C. born and bred, he has been the scene's first-call guitarist for, well, all of recent memory. That will come as no surprise, considering the frequency and variety of settings in which he's appeared on District bandstands. And his sound! It's a woody, smoky [...]
The lineup tonight at the DC Jazz Festival's downtown hub The Hamilton offers an interesting profile of a particular stylistic approach to the saxophone. Yes, Antonio Hart is an alto player, and Jimmy Heath is a tenor man. But both come from similar backgrounds: They grew up in Baltimore and Philadelphia (i.e., worn-down, industrial mid-Atlantic [...]
Jazz treatments of classical music have been a tradition since the days of Jelly Roll Morton. Still, it’s not so common to see a jazz band headlining a concert of works by the giants of the European conservatory. Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Rachmaninov, and Tchaikovsky all get the swing treatment in “Jazz Meets the Classics,” the [...]
