8E.Thursday, December 30, 2010_________________________________________ CHARLESTONSCENE.COM __________________________________________________ The Post and Courier
Savannah Music Festival announces plans M ark your calendar. The program for the 2011 edition of the Savannah Music Festival has been announced. And it’s a smoker. The city-wide extravaganza runs March 24-April 2. It’s chock full of all kinds of music, especially American, especially jazz, and it begs for lovers of any kind of music to check it out. In fact, it is one of the world’s most renowned cross-genre musical events right down the road from us. Regular readers of this column know that for the past five years, I have gorged myself on the sounds and sights of Savannah, one of the pearls, like Charleston, of the South Atlantic coast. Why talk about it so far in advance? Ever year when I come back from there, lots of people say if they had known sooner, they would have planned to go. Well, with this announcement, you have almost three months to manipulate your schedule. Ask anybody from here — and there are many — who have attended, and they will tell you it was worth it. As usual, the jazz lineup is strong, the biggest and best, except for New Orleans’ Jazz Fest, in the Southeast that I know of. The Savannah Jazz Festival is prominent and the Spoleto Festival USA jazz series is pre-eminent, but the Savannah Music Festival is unmatched. One of the headliners this year is a favorite son of South Carolina, Houston Person, one of the greatest living tenor saxophone players. Many of you heard the Florence native in Charleston this summer at the Charleston Jazz Initiative festival. In Savannah, he’ll be
Houston Person will perform at the Savannah Music Festival, which will be March 24-April 9. His “Moment to Moment” album sat atop music JazzWeek charts for nine weeks.
working with the Bill Charlap Trio. Another giant, trombonist Slide Hampton, a commissioned composer in Charleston this summer, will be there. Through the vision of its director, Rob Gibson, the festival reveals its continuity, creative design and genre-bending performances in its jazz series. For example, pianist Marcus Roberts will perform with eclectic banjo player Bela Fleck for an only-inSavannah collaboration. They jammed with others at a late-night festival session in 2008, inspiring each other and Gibson to mount this year’s concert. Roberts has great classical chops as well while Fleck, an 11-time Grammy winner, is all over the place on his instrument. For those with varied tastes, the Savannah festival features a mountain of classical, world, R&B, country, rock, Cuban, Americana, bluegrass, African, Baroque, Cajun and pop musics. All at the highest level of performance. The Atlanta Symphony will perform “Brahms, Haydn & Bruch,” featuring the festival’s assistant artistic director, Daniel Hope, on violin. New Orleans R&B master Allen Toussaint and his band are on the bill. Gibson has teamed them up with Britain’s blue-eyed soul singer James Hunter. Augusta native Sharon Jones will lead her Brooklyn, N.Y.-based gospel/funk nine-piece collective, the
GENE MARTIN
Dap-Kings, for the first time in these parts. All the way from India will be sarod player Amjad Ali Khan and tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain on a double bill with the South Indian classical dance virtuoso, Vijayalakshmi. A real example of the festival’s genre defiance is the Punch Brothers, a string ensemble led by mandolinist Chris Thile. Some may remember this group as one of the hits at Spoleto’s Jazz and More series in 2009. At that time, I described the act as improvisational country/classical chamber music. The Wall Street Journal calls it bluegrass with the
discipline of classical music and the unexpected angles of rock. Thile, the creative founder of the group, has broad tastes but at the same time he’s down to earth and rooted in Americana. Here’s a clue. He told me one of his favorite restaurants is Jestine’s on Meeting Street in Charleston. Between now and March, I plan to talk to Gibson and some of the artists performing in Savannah this year and share all that with you. There’s so much more. I can’t wait. For tickets or more information, visit savannahmusicfestival.org.
Christmas at the Grill
The lounge at the Charles-
ton Grill is still the best bet for high quality, impromptu jazz sessions. Christmas night there proved it. Holding forth were Kevin Hamilton on bass, Charlton Singleton on trumpet, Asa Holgate on drums and Tommy Gill on piano. Halfway through the second set, trombone wunderkind T.J. Robinson showed up and sat in. The band was already groovin’ but when he took the stand, the music started to percolate. They called “All Blues,” the Miles Davis evergreen, and took it to another level. Holgate’s brushwork was magnificent, shuffling things along, while Gill
played majestic chords and understated figures. Hamilton was in the pocket and Singleton danced above it all, hinting at Davis with his own phrasing. Robinson added a dimension not usually heard on this piece, playing mostly in the lower register of his horn, bringing a melodic depth and breadth not usually heard on this simple blues pattern. The full house was into it, too, feeding the band and pushing it to higher heights. Jack McCray, author of “Charleston Jazz,” can be reached at jackjmccray@aol. com.