Jazz 101: A primer: Bebop. Post bop. Hard swing. Acid, free form and Dixieland. It's all part of the package at the jazz festival, opening today. Alex Hutchinson provides a guide to help you navigate.
The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Page: F1 / FRONT
Section: Arts
Byline: Alex Hutchinson
Source: The Ottawa Citizen

Just weeks after the ultra-secretive Bilderberg group
convened in Ottawa, the city is receiving another group of
inscrutable, enigmatic experts: jazz fans.

While most art forms are understandably eager to sell themselves, jazz has always been a bit standoffish, sometimes even taking a perverse pride in being inaccessible. The oldest jazz cliche -- older even than the average jazz fan -- concerns the definition of jazz: "If you gotta ask, you'll never know," Louis Armstrong reportedly quipped.

Not quite the customer outreach policy organizers of the TD Canada Trust Ottawa International Jazz Festival, which opens today and runs to July 2, might have hoped for. The truth is, jazz is a notoriously slippery concept: just ask Toronto reggae-rockers Bedouin Soundclash, who may still be wondering how they wound up on the jazzfest's main stage, and whether it will hurt their record sales.

The all-encompassing diversity makes the festival program all the more difficult to navigate for neophytes. One band promises
everything "from hard swing to lyrical balladry," another offers
"western swing" and "jazz manouche." How to choose?

With that in mind, here is a back-of-the-envelope primer on the
early history and styles of jazz, along with some festival picks to
illustrate.

New Orleans: There's no precise point when ragtime, brass-band
marches and blues coalesced into something we would call jazz. But the music in New Orleans' French Quarter in the 1910s and 1920s is a good place to start. Often called Dixieland (though this term now sometimes refers to white musicians playing New Orleans music), this is the style Louis Armstrong made famous. A typical incarnation has a trumpet playing the melody while a clarinet and trombone improvise in the gaps. Think When the Saints Go Marchin' In -- but if you're in New Orleans, don't request it: the musicians are sick of it, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band even has a special surcharge if you ask for it.

Bands: The Preservation Hall Jazz Band (Monday) is the archetypal New Orleans group, and they've been touring tirelessly since Hurricane Katrina. For a vocalist's take on the material, check out Toronto's Alex Pangman & Her Alleycats on Tuesday.

Swing: Once upon a time, jazz was the pop music of its day.
Muscular big bands with a booming bass drum and more than a dozen saxes, trumpets and trombones on the front line dominated the airwaves in the 1930s: Glenn Miller played In the Mood, Count Basie played One O'Clock Jump, Duke Ellington played Cottontail, and audiences danced the night away. Swing, both the music and the dance style, made a comeback in the 1990s (remember the movie Swingers?), thanks in part to bands such as Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. The revival bands tend to be smaller -- a seven-piece band can tour more economically than an 18-piece band -- but they boast the same crisp brass arrangements and jumpy swing rhythms as the originals.

Bands: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy -- as heard in Swingers, recent Disney movie The Wild and at the Super Bowl halftime show in 1999 -- plays on Wednesday. To experience the power of a full-size 18-piece big band, albeit with a more modern sound and repertoire, try Montreal's Joe Sullivan Big Band on Monday.

Bebop: In the 1940s, tempos got faster, rhythms more complex,
harmonies more dissonant -- and suddenly jazz was less danceable and started to drift out of the mainstream. But for many modern fans, this is where the creativity and boundary-pushing of jazz begins. Central to bebop is the virtuoso soloist: saxman Charlie Parker, trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie. In contrast to intricately arranged big-band pieces, bebop emphasizes individual exploration through improvised solos, a trait that continued to dominate the post-bop jazz that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s.

Bands: There aren't many bands playing pure, unadulterated bebop at this year's festival, but there's a great selection of post-bop soloists whose playing is deeply rooted in that vocabulary. In
particular, check out three sax dervishes: Ottawa teen Nathan
Cepelinski (tomorrow), Toronto tenorman Kirk MacDonald (Wednesday), and big-name New Yorker Jon Gordon (tomorrow).

Latin: Dizzy Gillespie began experimenting with Afro-Cuban rhythms in the 1940s, in collaboration with Cuban percussionist Machito. The marriage of rhythms like mambo and rhumba with jazz harmonies and solos created a new -- and popular -- genre. In the 1960s, sax great Stan Getz helped bring Brazilian samba and bossa nova to a jazz audience, making The Girl from Ipanema as repetitive a request as When the Saints Go Marchin' In was for an earlier generation.

Bands: Paquito D'Rivera takes over the festival's traditional
weekend Latin jazz slot on Saturday. The Cuban-born saxophonist has a repertoire that covers pretty much all of South America -- as does Edmonton-based !Bomba!, scheduled for Thursday, June 29.

Free jazz: If bebop gave musicians the freedom to explore in
individual solos, the free jazz of the 1960s took that freedom a
step further. Bands would create entire songs -- harmony, melody, even rhythm -- spontaneously, putting the emphasis on group dynamics and the interplay between musicians. It's hard to describe a typical free jazz sound, because the whole point is that there are no rules.

Bands: Double-bassist Michael Bates' quartet Outside Sources
(Tuesday) is one of several excellent rule-bending groups on tap.
The duo of saxophonist Sonny Fortune and drummer Rashied Ali (Saturday) is another.

And so on ...

Jazz has continued to branch off in new directions. "Third Stream" jazz incorporated classical influences, fusion absorbed rock's backbeat, and acid jazz combined jazz and hip hop.

These days, you almost need a separate category for each musician at the festival, partly because most contemporary jazz musicians don't like being pigeonholed. "They don't mind being compared to other people, but they resist being categorized," the festival's executive director, Catherine O'Grady, says. "We end up using a lot of words like 'fun' and 'accessible.'"

Still, if you listen to anyone at the festival -- superstar pianist
Brad Mehldau, crooner John Pizzarelli, even Bedouin Soundclash -- you'll hear echoes of New Orleans, bebop and other precursors. These snatches of rhythm and melody, together with a restless improvisational spirit, are as good a definition of jazz as there is.

The Ottawa Jazz Festival opens today and runs through July 2.