June 27, 2010 Real Jazz
A late night and a lazy, muggy day eating at Chez Room Service, then off for some real jazz. I get to a few jazz festivals, but I don’t get to much jazz, unless I stumble across it in an after-show bar. But Chano Dominguez is the real thing, a pianist who Wynton Maralis calls one of the 10 finest musicians in the world. Music pours from his fingertips in torrents of arpeggios, trills and runs. He calls his show “Flamenco View”, which is why I go, and although he plays from a wide repertoire - Miles Davis, tango, and the odd standard – the Spanish influence runs through it all. He is accompanied by a studly avante garde flamenco dancer attired in black silk and botas who kicks up a storm, flutters his hands dramatically, slaps his butt like “giddy-up horsey” and puts his skinny tie in his mouth like a walrus with tusks. Hard to describe, but wildly wonderful, flamenco on nitrous oxide, with a vocal accompaniment from a “Gypsy Kings”-style singer. Listen as “El Puerto” builds and crescendos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUmqXZV6-3I&feature=related
After I go to L’Astral, one of the many clubs around the main festival, it is a beautiful modern venue for 350, designed specifically for jazz and blues. The show is Youn Sun Nah, a lithe, sweet Korean singer and her wonderful acoustic guitar accompanist Ulf Walkenius, who used to with Oscar Peterson and, incongruously, could be my brother. This is the best thing about big festivals, stumbling across amazing things. Youn is going to be impossible to describe so listen to her cover Tom Waitt’s “Jockey Full of Bourbon”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enq1f-4nT2A&feature=related
She closes singing Randy Neuman’s “I Still Love You” accompanying herself with a little music box with a long tape, winding it slower and faster and then, at the end, barely at all.
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