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Jazz Fest Diary, Day Six

Day Six

• Karl-Martin Almqvist
• Shuffle Demons
• Lew Tabackin Trio

Tonight's shows cleared up a few things about the Jazz festival that had been lingering in the back of my mind. I had been pondering what makes one performance better than another. After five days of the festival I feel like I'm running out of superlatives to use when describing the acts I've seen; It's getting crowded on those top couple of rungs. Also, I notice that I tend to prefer the harder-edged performances over the more straightforward ones, which leaves me thinking that I'm somehow missing some nuance in the quieter music.

This feeling nagged at me as I stood listening to Karl-Martin Almqvist and his quartet. Here was a solid band, playing straight-ahead Coltrane-flavored jazz, and while they were certainly no slouches, the music just didn't grab me. All the ingredients seemed to be there, but I couldn't help feeling that there was just something missing.

Moving to the festival tent to hear the Shuffle Demons, I discovered one of the necessary ingredients. This was the ingredient missing from the Pete Carney/Orange Alert performance the other night: fun. Here was a band who entered by walking through the crowd playing a funky saxophone riff wearing suits that looked as if they had been designed by Keith Haring while being held at gunpoint and whose original tunes include "Puker," "Funkin' Pumpkin'," and "Get Out of My House, Roach." The music wasn't sophisticated, but it was fun. Seth and I barely tore ourselves away just before the end of the set to head on over to the Montage to see the Lew Tabackin Trio.

And good thing we did. We got there in time to grab a couple of the last remaining seats and settled in to hear some of the sweetest, most sincere music of the festival. It was here that I discovered the ingredient missing from the Almqvist performance: passion. Boris Kozlov on bass and Mark Taylor on drums were not overly flashy. They were certainly accomplished and more mature and subtle than most. And Tabackin, especially on flute, was the most soulful, sensitive musician I have seen so far at this festival.