All that jazz
I fill my boots at the Wellington Jazz Festival.
It was a miraculous transformation. I spent four days in our capital city last week attending the Wellington Jazz Festival, and came home a profoundly changed man.
Upon my chin, as if by magic, there had sprouted a fetching goatee, and I awoke one morning to find that I’d somehow mastered the old Broadway dance move known as ‘‘jazz hands’’ in my sleep.
As I strode down Cuba St one night, en route to yet another horn-heavy gig, I found myself wearing corduroy and craving Coltrane. When contemplating appropriate millinery, a beret no longer seemed a step too far. And jammed between two fat fingers, smoking like a bonfire and risking the prohibitionist ire of Peter Dunne, was a giant medicinal jazz cigarette.
Duke and Bird, Monk and Prez, Lady Day and Cannonball, Satch and Dizzy, Lockjaw and Jeep: the nicknames of the jazz greats tripped off my tongue with a peppy sort of poetry as I sauntered towards Wellington Opera House each evening to have my fill.
Some might have considered this a tough assignment. After all, jazz is not everyone’s mug of absinthe.
Some dismiss jazz as a dusty sonic relic of their grandparents’ generation, while others complain how unrestful it can be to listen to, with its tricky time signatures and unreasonable harmonic progressions.
Fair enough. There’s no denying that some jazz recalls the hurtful honking of a traffic jam, or a cold intellectual exercise where all of the music’s soulful grit has disappeared beneath flashy displays of technical proficiency.
Jazz seems little more than a lifestyle accessory in some quarters, played at polite volume to add a veneer of sophistication to middle-class dinner parties, the clinking of cutlery hidden behind a gentle pattering of drums, husky sax, a pallid tootling of trumpets, some appalling scat singing.
But there’s so much more awaiting any listener prepared to dig deeper. Setting aside the slick supper club sound of some practitioners, jazz can be as wild as a National Park, as raw as sushi, as in-your-face as any punk band.
Jazz can be among the most generously emotive and lifeaffirming genres out there, which is why I braved a turbulent flight across Cook Strait to get an earful, arriving in the capital ready to absorb whatever the festival might throw at me, my mind as open as a freshly steamed pipi.
On the Wednesday night, I went to hear Wayne Shorter, whom the New York Times recently proclaimed the ‘‘greatest living small-group composer in jazz’’.
A swinging Buddhist with 10 Grammies, Shorter could be heard honking away with righteous fervour in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the 50s, the Miles Davis Quintet in the 60s, and Weather Report in the 70s.
Now 82, Shorter strode onto the Wellington Opera House stage before a sellout crowd and tore things up, sitting back and listening for long periods while his band batted fractured rhythms back and forth, then rising into the gap with questing, slow-burn solos whenever they opened a window for him.
On the Friday night, I shambled along to watch Mulatu Astatke, the venerable don of Ethiopian jazz, and the funkiest 73-year-old to ever draw breath. It was a gig that polarised viewers, many of whom complained the headliner barely played a note while his Melbourne backing band, The Black Jesus Experience, bashed out sped-up covers of the master’s songs.
Personally, I could have done without the redundant rapper, but I was happy to be in the same room, hearing those familiar tunes knocked out with gusto by a band of talented dingo-dodgers while the great man nodded his approval centre-stage.
But my favourite gigs of the week were local shows, both of them taking place in elegantly rumpled local bar, Meow. First, two rowdy reprobates calling themselves Uncle Silverback and Captain Fruju played their own eccentric interpretation of West Side Story. Their instruments? Two drum kits, a turntable, and a trombone.
No sooner had I scraped my jaw off the floor than The Labcoats took the stage, a experimental collective comprising past and present members of Trinity Roots, Fat Freddy’s Drop, The Muttonbirds, and Six Volts; they made a concerted assault on commonsense, bashing out a mad-scientist racket with the aid of trumpet, theremin, banjo, drums, and ‘‘electrified suitcase’’.
Between gigs, I rambled around a city that now has so many craft beer joints, a ripe pong of hops hangs heavy over the CBD. It seemed rude not to visit most of them while in town getting my jazz on.
Tucker? There was good food everywhere, including an outdoor night market with a jazz stage of its own, but I lived instead on IPA, diminished seventh chords, and jazz cigarettes.
I had come looking for a bold and bracing jazz experience, and Wellington really dished it up. My mind blown, I limped back out to the airport, a born-again beatnik bound for home.