Tag Archives: new mexico jazz festival

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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Marginally Obsessed

Still-Runnin-Cover-JPEG-300x274Matt Munisteri, Still Runnin’ Round in the Wilderness, The Lost Music of Willard
Robison, Volume 1 (Old Cow Music)

I’m often astonished by how much I don’t know, and sometimes grateful for my
ignorance because the potential for wonder and surprise is ever present.

Recently, I had a dose of surprise and wonder that concealed a second dose, and it all
started with Patti Littlefield. When the
schedule for the 2013 New Mexico Jazz
Festival was published, that flame-haired chanteuse, who doubles as a staff member at the Outpost, alerted me to the upcoming appearance of vocalist Catherine Russell, of whom I’d never heard.

Patti Littlefield, who started this.

“You gotta check her out,” Patti advised.

So I did, because Patti knows the goods when she hears them, and I was rewarded by encountering a stunning new-to-me artist to
explore. I arranged to interview her for a preview article on her jazz fest appearance, and I attended her concert in Old Town Plaza last weekend, where she and her band knocked the socks off of one and all. Now, Russell gets regular play in our house.

But there was another surprise waiting for me when I started to chat with her guitarist and musical director, the articulate, funny, earnest, and gently ironic Matt Munisteri, who saw fit to hand me his latest CD, Still Runnin’ Round in the Wilderness, The Lost Music of Willard Robison, Volume 1.

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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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