Category Archives: Previews

New Mexico Jazz Festival: Tom McDermott

Getting Better All the Time

Photo by Rick Olivier.

Photo by Rick Olivier.

In 1996, while in New Orleans for jazz fest, I picked up a copy of Offbeat magazine and
discovered a well-written article about one of my favorite piano players from that city, the late James Booker. I thought I had all the legally available recordings, but the article mentioned two German LPs that I had never heard of. Even better, they were solo performances, so there would be no half-assed sidemen gumming up the works.

I did what any self-respecting obsessionist would do: I looked up the writer in the phone book and placed the call. (My wife still can’t believe I did that, and I still can’t figure out why she feels that way.) When he answered, I thanked him for the article and inquired if he would be willing, since the LPs were not available in the States, to record them for me if I supplied the cassette tapes.

Yes, he said, he would, and that’s how I met Tom McDermott, who will close the 2013 New Mexico Jazz Festival this Sunday at the Outpost.

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New Mexico Jazz Festival: Lionel Loueke Trio

Lionel Loueke Plugs In

Award-winning guitarist Lionel Loueke, a native of Benin, dazzled the jazz world by blending his African roots with the modern jazz vocabulary on his signature acoustic, nylon-string guitar. His gentle virtuosity has graced the work of such jazz heavyweights as Terence Blanchard, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter, and informed several well-received recordings of his own.

Photo by Brantley Gutierrez.

Photo by Brantley Gutierrez.

For his latest album, Heritage (Blue Note Records), however, Loueke has ditched the nylon strings in favor of steel and added an electric guitar to his bag. Though displaying the same lyricism as the nylon, acoustic Loueke, the steel-strung and electrified Louekes take a more percussive attack and, if possible, groove even harder. Heritage also finds the guitarist actively stretching his concept of what a guitar can do, and he amplifies this expansion with judicious use of pedal effects on the electric instrument.

Working with a new trio that features Michael Olatuja on bass and John Davis on drums, Loueke brings his electric project to the New Mexico Jazz Festival, first for two nights at the Outpost in Albuquerque, then moving up to Santa Fe to open for trumpeter Terence Blanchard, whom he will also join onstage.

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New Mexico Jazz Festival: Catherine Russell

The New Mexico Jazz Festival begins this week, offering 16 days of concerts, photos, film, and more in both Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll focus on a few of the featured artists that will be rearranging time and space for your listening pleasure and the good of your soul. Go to New Mexico Jazz Festival for complete information on all the events.

Catherine Russell Makes the Past Present

Cat digs in.

Cat digs in.

Vocalist Catherine Russell
provides an unanswerable
counterargument to those who would claim that there’s no point in recording yet another
version of vintage-songs-that’ve-been-done-by-many: “These are great songs, and I want to sing them, too.”

You go, girl.

Because she chooses songs that speak to her, and finds a personal way to phrase each and every one of them, Russell reinvigorates material that, in the vocal cords of a lesser singer, might be mere antiques or tired reproductions. Her latest album, Strictly Romancin’ (World Village Records), features songs from the likes of Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, and Mary Lou Williams, and she and her bandmates comfortably inhabit these tunes, making them feel as present as now.

Russell brings her smooth, supple, resonant alto and fresh phrasing to a free concert this
Saturday in Albuquerque’s Old Town Plaza as part of the New Mexico Jazz Festival, where she’ll be joined by guitarist and musical director Matt Munisteri, pianist Mark Shane, bassist Lee
Hudson, and drummer Mark McLean. (Guitarist Dan Dowling and bassist John Griffin will open the afternoon’s festivities.)

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Rare and Special: Chuy Martinez and Oti Ruiz in Concert

Chuy Martinez. Photo by Mel Minter.

Chuy Martinez. Photo by Mel Minter.

Chuy Martinez (guitar, vocals) and Oti Ruiz (harp, violin, requinto, vocals) came to music via very different paths that intersected very sweetly. Martinez learned to play guitar while working as a migrant farmworker in California, a job he started at age 12, when he fled from an abusive foster home. Joining the the United Farm Workers Union at 16, he worked rallies in many states as an organizer and musician. Ruiz, orphaned at 11 and growing up with his grandmother in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, started playing at age 13. He studied at the Music Conservatory in Xalapa and went on to tour the world with internationally renowned groups.

Oti Ruiz. Photo by Mel Minter.

Oti Ruiz. Photo by Mel Minter.

In 2001, fate or luck or the angels, call it what you will, brought them together in
Albuquerque at trying times in their lives. Playing Latin American music together brought solace and direction, and bore fruit: within a year of meeting, they produced their lovely first CD, Pa’ Uste’, a passionately
delivered collection of popular and folkloric music from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Their artistic collaboration has continued ever since. Unfortunately, their day jobs prevent them from playing out very often. Martinez is Old Town manager/curator for Albuquerque’s Cultural Services Department/Community Events and is well-known as the host of Lo Maduro de la Cultura, a popular public-access TV show on the arts. Ruiz teaches at Coronado Elementary and is music director of La Rondalla de
Albuquerque. That makes their concert at the Outpost this Friday, May 10, where they’ll be joined by John Mancha (guitarrón, accordion), a rare and special event.

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Asher Barreras and John Maestas Go Large

Last summer, when bassist Asher Barreras and guitarist John Maestas booked a set for a nonet in the Outpost’s summer series, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew these two native Burqueans as primo players and ambitious composers who have swallowed a variety of genres while swimming in the jazz ocean. I’d heard them shine as sidemen and as coequals in their Humoso quartet. But a nonet with reed and brass sections? What exactly would two young string-plucking whippersnappers know about writing for a mess of wind instruments?

Well, it was a smokin’ set, and it featured some of the Southwest’s best players, several of whom also contributed fine compositions. It was so good, in fact, that the Outpost invited the nonet back for a full evening in the middle of the high-profile spring season.

Expectations have now been raised, but I’ve no doubt that this Thursday, Barreras, Maestas, and company—Kanoa Kaluhiwa and Aaron Lovato (tenor sax), Glenn Kostur (alto sax), Paul Gonzales and JQ Whitcomb (trumpet), Ben Finberg (trombone), and Paul Palmer III (drums), with help from special guest Albuquerque Poet Laureate Hakim Bellamy—will satisfy those
expectations and then some.

The summer 2012 version of the Barreras/Maestas nonet. Photo by and courtesy of Jim Gale.

The summer 2012 version of the John Maestas–Asher Barreras nonet. Photo by and courtesy of Jim Gale.

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