On a spirited Saturday, the Newport Jazz Festival defies labels
The young British saxophonist Nubya Garcia brought her big, Sonny Rollins-inspired tone and songs from her second album, 'Odyssey,' to the main stage. And the wonderfully inventive drummer Marcus Gilmore led a band in tribute to his late grandfather, the Boston-born
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That ad-hoc band featured a quartet of ringers, led by alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett and supported by two Berklee College of Music faculty members, the pianist Danilo Pérez and bassist John Patitucci.
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Pianist Danilo Pérez, bassist John Patitucci, alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett, and drummer Marcus Gilmore perform a tribute to Roy Haynes on Saturday at the Newport Jazz Festival.
Rich Fury/Courtesy of the Newport Jazz Festival
But the congenial crowd also heard plenty of sounds that stretched the boundaries of 'traditional' jazz. There was experimental chill-out music, Quiet Storm-style neo-soul, a banging DJ set from a descendant of jazz royalty, and a 75-minute finale from headliner Janelle Monáe that was heavy on the funk.
Perhaps the most welcome surprise came from the Fleck, Castañeda, Sánchez Trio, which combined the virtuosic banjo playing of the restless bluegrass mainstay Béla Fleck with the superb drummer Antonio Sánchez, and the Colombian harpist Edmar Castañeda. Castañeda was a revelation. Attacking his instrument with flair and aggression, he's surely been called 'the Jimi Hendrix of the harp' elsewhere.
The group call themselves the BEATrio, Sánchez explained, after their respective first-name initials.
McBride and Newport Festivals Foundation executive director Jay Sweet have taken plenty of steps to acknowledge the listening habits of the younger cohort of their Newport fan base. Some in attendance seemed eager to see the mononymous Willow, the daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. Anchoring the last set on the Quad Stage, she and her ferocious, mostly women band tapped into '90s nostalgia and the singer's vocal range and dexterity on her latest tracks, including 'home' (co-written with Jon Batiste) and 'symptom of life.'
Willow performs on Saturday at the Newport Jazz Festival.
Rich Fury/Courtesy of the Newport Jazz Festiva
Wearing headphones, the young British rap/R&B singer Samm Henshaw acknowledged that he hadn't performed live in a while.
'So you're all very scary to me right now,' he joked before teeing up some new songs with the crowd-pleasing 'How Does It Feel?,' his 2018 breakthrough.
Other relative newcomers included KNOWER, an experimental mashup led by a punky frontwoman (Genevieve Artadi) and a drummer (Louis Cole) who drives the band from drum-and-bass to prog metal, and Rich Ruth, the full-band project of Nashvillean multi-instrumentalist Michael Ruth. Their unusual blend, including xylophone, violin, and baritone sax, resulted in an impressionistic, spacey-slash-spiritual sound that hit a sweet spot around midday.
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The jazz royalty previously mentioned was Flying Lotus, the alter ego of DJ-producer Steven Ellison, who is the grandnephew of Alice Coltrane. FlyLo, as he's known, alternated between deafening video-game glitchery and rump-shaking classics (P-Funk, Kool & the Gang, an isolated guitar rhythm that sounded like KC and the Sunshine Band) at the Fort Stage.
'I don't know if you can tell,' he boomed from atop his perch. 'I'm trying to get you all to dance.'
Flying Lotus, the grandnephew of Alice Coltrane, appears at the Fort Stage of the Newport Jazz Festival on Saturday.
Rich Fury/Courtesy of the Newport JAzz
It worked for him. Monáe, in the day's final slot on the main stage, had to work hard to keep the crowd from streaming toward the lines for the buses and water ferries. Fronting a dapper big band, she leaned into her defiant persona (on recent tracks 'Float' and 'Champagne [expletive]') before shouting out musical greats, from Prince, Nina Simone, and Miles Davis, to Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Bits of reggae, electronica, and James Brown surfaced in her music before an inevitable encore of 'Tightrope,' her biggest hit. Fitting for the setting, she wrapped up with 'Come Alive (War of the Roses),' a song that borrows from the Cab Calloway, call-and-response era of big band jazz.
'Categorize me, I defy every label,' she'd rapped earlier in the set, on 'Q.U.E.E.N.' They could have used that as the day's tagline.
NEWPORT JAZZ FESTIVAL
At Fort Adams State Park, Newport, R.I., Saturday
James Sullivan can be reached at
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