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.