Harrison, Neville, and Butler in Springfield
I’m still buzzing from the double dose of New Orleans-in-New England that highlighted Saturday’s Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival. Performances by Donald Harrison and Henry Butler brought the one-day, twelve-hour festival to a rousing conclusion at Court Square, where an estimated 5000 people from every walk of life gathered downtown for the second annual festival. (Jazz & Roots is produced by Blues to Green, an organization founded by Kristen and Charles Neville and Evan Plotkin; click here to view 88 photos taken on Saturday and posted by MassLive.) While Butler was the headliner, Harrison’s set was less a prelude and more the opening volley in a soundscape that resounded for nearly three hours and evoked Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Professor Longhair, Earl King, Sugar Boy Crawford, Irma Thomas, James Brown, the Neville Brothers, and the mythical Uptown Ruler. The festival’s preceding eight hours featured an impressive variety of music that encompassed Latin, Ellingtonia, bebop, gospel, roots rock, and bassist Avery Sharpe’s tribute to gospel legend Sister Rosetta Tharpe; Charles Neville was the featured saxophone soloist with “Sharpe to Tharpe.”)
Evan Christopher wasn’t among the New Orleanians present on Saturday, but the previous weekend he gave a presentation on Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong at Satchmo Fest in the Crescent City. Evan is one of the world’s greatest clarinet players, travelling what he calls the Clarinet Road. It brought him to New Orleans from his native San Diego in 1994, and he’s branched out from there to connect with musicians in New York, Paris, and other locales where there’s a receptive community of players seeking to add creativity to the tradition.
I spoke with Evan in 2012. (Click here to listen to our wide-ranging conversation, and here for an earlier blog, Evan Christopher on the Clarinet Road.) The link below will connect you to video of Evan’s presentation focusing on the 1924 recordings by the Clarence Williams Blue Five, which brought Bechet and Armstrong together for the first and most significant time on records. He’s joined here by trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso and guitarist Matt Munistari. (Matt was in Springfield on Saturday as a member of Butler, Bernstein & the Hot 9.)
http://original.livestream.com/directionofsky/video?clipId=pla_2d1ae4fc-0864-4c8a-a64b-df8e22bec6d1
We’ll hear Evan’s elegiac post-Katrina recording, The Remembering Song, in tonight’s Jazz a la Mode.