Tanglewood concert reviews

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Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Wynton Marsalis at Tanglewood

July 18, 2015 Article by Dave Read

Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra gave a concert in Ozawa Hall yesterday that could serve as the template for all concerts: two sets artfully arranged to engage, sustain, and satisfy an auditor’s attention, with just the right measure of exposition from the stage to establish a conversation, contextualize the selections, and identify the musicians. Marsalis was an amiable host from his 3rd row seat in the trumpet section of the band, which he led through an overview of early 20th century jazz in the first set, followed by a set made up of compositions and arrangements by musicians in the band.

Seiji Ozawa Hall lawn scene at Tanglewood; Dave Read photo.

Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra on Ozawa Hall stage.

Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra bow to Ozawa Hall audience.

Tonight’s concert got underway with fairly quiet and subtle playing on compositions from the 1930s by Benny Carter, Symphony in Riffs and Duke Ellington, Mood Indigo. By the time the 3rd piece was over, George Gershwin’s Fascinating Rhythm, we knew we were in for quite a treat, as we’d already heard lovely solos by Marsalis on trumpet, Victor Goines on clarinet, and all three trombone players. The set ended with Things to Come by Dizzy Gillespie, which afforded everybody ample space to play, especially the exquisite rhythm section, emerging in the wake of a long trumpet run.

After intermission, the concert continued with a piece called 2/3 Adventure, by bassist Carlos Henriquez, then one rooted in spirituals by trombonist Chris Crenshaw. Next in the spotlight was pianist Dan Nimmer with a selection from a suite he composed from important political speeches. That was followed by sax player Sherman Irby’s arrangement of a composition by Wayne Shorter, who played with the orchestra recently.

The concert closed with Marsalis’s own Back to Basics from his Oratorio, Blood on the Fields, the first jazz composition to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Music (1997). Everyone in the band got another chance to solo, with Marsalis himself bringing it all to a humorous, muttering conclusion, waving the plunger mute over the bell of his trumpet.

Marsalis dedicates concert to the late Gunther Schuller

Marsalis dedicated the concert to the late Gunther Schuller, telling the audience that his stint at the Berkshire Music Center, which Schuller ran from 1970 until 1984, “changed my life.” At 17, he was the youngest musician ever admitted; two years later, he joined the Jazz Messengers lead by legendary drummer and bandleader Art Blakey.

2005 Tanglewood Jazz Festival

Sept. 3, 2005 performance, reviewed by Dave Conlin Read

Review of Diane Schuur, Dave Samuels and the Caribbean Jazz Project, Toots Thielemans, Kenny Werner, Oscar Castro-Neves, Airto, performances at the 2005 Tanglewood Jazz Festival, in Lenox, MA

Saturday is the most festival-like day at the Tanglewood Jazz Festival, with performances on each of Tanglewood’s three stages (Theatre, Ozawa Hall, Koussevitsky Music Shed) plus a panel discussion sponsored by the Jazz Journalists Association on the patio at Saranak, former home of Serge Koussevitzky.

The Tanglewood Jazz Cafe added to festival-feel this year, with performances by up-and-coming jazz artists in informal settings near Ozawa Hall. They began ninety minutes before each major concert.

At noon, the Legends Trio featuring Skitch Henderson, Bucky Pizzarelli, and Jay Leonhart took to the Theatre Stage and first legend Henderson took to the microphone for remarks “before this epic of improvisation,” as he put it. The epic lasted but sixty minutes, close to a quarter of which were filled with Henderson’s pat show-biz anecdotes.

Bucky Pizzarelli did get a couple of opportunities to display his tasteful wizardry on his seven-string guitar and Jay Leonhart practically stole the show with his very funny talking blues about being seatmates with Leonard Bernstein during a cross-country flight. And a young violinist named Sara Caswell was a welcome addition to the trio.

We caught about forty minutes of the panel discussion which convened an interesting mix of musicians and journalists to grapple with “The Big Cross-Over: Jazz, Classical, Pop and Beyond.” You can’t argue with the location, about half a mile from the main gate on the side of the hill commanding one of the best views in the Berkshires, but for one to take in the whole program would’ve meant leaving the “Legends” show early and maybe being late to the 3 PM at Ozawa Hall.

As it was, we heard plenty, including comments on the increasing importance of the Internet, at the expense of major record labels, as a means of distribution. Panelist Walter Beasley, a saxophonist and long-time faculty member (and alumnus) of Berklee College of Music, said that he encourages his students to “do it yourself” rather than rely on established labels, adding that he makes more money today selling his own CDs at concerts than he would with a traditional label deal.

During a segment on terminology, panelist Donal Fox, whose program “Remembering the Modern Jazz Quartet: Donal Fox, Inventions in Blue” was a highlight of the 2003 festival, offered the cautionary note that “it’s an important historical fact that artists do not use the word ‘jazz’,” citing Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis as examples.

Donal Fox and Steffon Harris Tanglewood Jazz Festival — Donal Fox and Steffon Harris perform during 2003 Tanglewood Jazz Festival

The very existence of any such thing as “Cross-over” was questioned by panelist Tom Reney, host of a daily jazz program on WFCR since 1984, who said he never sees references to such a genre in the mainstream jazz media. Beasley had a more provocative take on what may be seen by some as a meaningful genre when he said, “I hate smooth jazz because it isn’t smooth and it isn’t jazz.”

Probably due to logistics, the audience barely out-numbered the panelists, which is too bad because it was a very collegial group of experts, each of whom not only had pleny to say but also the facility to say it well.

Marian McPartland’s guest for her fourth annual taping of NPR’s “Piano Jazz” at Tanglewood was vocalist (and guitarist) Madeleine Peyroux, who, for about a week, had been the subject of articles in the British press that had her missing but that turned out to be a publicity stunt.

The ageless Ms. McPartland was at the top of her form, chatting with the audience that an arthritic knee and an injury to the other leg leave her “not one leg to stand on;” and that the constraints of taping for radio prevent her from being “free and easy as I like to be;” and introducing her guest as “a chart-topping chanteuse.”

Ms. Peyroux played selections from her current release “Careless Love,” about which she has said, “I am in love with every one of these songwriters as well as their songs. I was eager to make that heard during the recordings.”

It came across in performance, on Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me To The End Of Love,” and Bessie Smith’s “Don’t Cry Baby,” and on Josephine Baker’s first hit, “J’ai Deux Amours,” which she explained that she means to reference her own dual allegiance for both France and the USA.

During the ninety or so minutes of the “live taping,” Ms. Peyroux seemed to be more comfortable in Ms. McPartland’s company, rather than in front of an audience of 3,600 fans, but her performance didn’t suffer for it. She was gracious, and sang beautifully; her voice sharing the fragile, vulnerable sound of Billie Holliday’s.

The headline event turned out to be a great crowd-pleaser but we found irksome because it was made to feel like dozens of sound samples rather than be allowed to coalesce into a fluid musical event. This was mostly the case during the opening set by the Count Basie Orchestra, when every solo was taken center stage followed by a bow to the audience and a handshake with band leader Bill Hughes and then the walk back to their seat.

They tell me that’s how it was done during the heyday of the Big Bands, but not only did it destroy the effect that was the composer’s object (in stringing together so many notes without big non-musical gaps), but it seemed demeaning to the musicians, the perfunctory handshakes resembling treats and pats on the head given to trick dogs.

Tony Bennett plays final concert of 2014 Tanglewood season.

Tony Bennett was absolutely splendid, as always, looking fit and tanned in royal blue suit and most ably accompanied by his quartet, Lee Muskier, piano; Gary Sargent, guitar; Paul Langosch, bass; Harold Jones, drums, as well as by the Basie band.

Mr. Bennett’s set was much more fluid; his custom is to sidle up to his sidemen during their solos and so direct the spotlight – and the applause – on them. And speaking of applause, he got one of the greatest rounds ever heard here when he announced mid-set, “I’m not working for pay tonight – I’m sending it all to the fellows down south.”

Trombone Shorty, Ben Harpur double bill stuns Tanglewood throng

Article updated September 6, 2019 by Dave Read

Bob Dylan’s song from the Basement Tapes, Too Much of Nothing, comes to mind while reflecting on my last visit to the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood during the 2019 season, ironically, because both headliners that day delivered an evening’s worth of entertainment, and I could’ve gone home a happy man with my musical appetite fully sated at the conclusion of Trombone Shorty’s set.

Nothing but good music tonight – but was too much squeezed into one program? I think separate programs of more typical two set shows would have been better, allowing us to stretch out and savor the music, and allow the enjoyment to linger, rather than having to rinse the auditory palate and gear up right away for another hullabaloo.

Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue 2019 Tanglewood concert review; photo:Hilary Scott.

If I had split after Shorty’s set, it would have been the dumbest decision I’d made since that time I wore my white bucks after Labor Day! Ben Harpur and the Innocent Criminals are that good. Just two nights earlier, we split the scene at the conclusion of the Mavericks rousing set, 100% incurious to hang around to find out what Squeeze sounds like. (We had taken a pass during the 1970s on the Second British invasion, which the advance publicity listed Squeeze as being in the vanguard of.)

Ben Harpur and the innocent Criminals 2019 Tanglewood concert review; photo:Hilary Scott.

I really was a little tired after the first set, because I’d got caught up front in the aisle where I’d gone to see what all the fuss was about and got trapped by aisle-clogging dancers, and eventually got caught up in the fun – the sort of infectious fun, with a pronounced aerobic aspect, that may be common in the Big Easy, but sure ain’t hereabouts! And speaking of dancing in the aisles, one could dust off the “cut a rug” cliche if you’re talking about the aisle in the Shed where the big green benches used to be, because they replaced the benches with beige carpeting!

But seriously folks, this was a real treat – two musicians with mastery of their instruments, no small feat in itself, but also two musicians sufficiently tuned in to what an audience wants that they assemble the right cohort of equally great players into bands for the performance of skillfully paced shows. One example from each set: Dan Oestreicher’s solo on baritone sax was out of this world as was the bit of business by percussionist Leon Mobley, a student of Babatundi Olatunji, namechecked in I Shall Be Free (1963) by the only musician who could bookend this report, Bob Dylan.

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2019 Tanglewood schedule

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has released the schedule for the 2019 season at Tanglewood, which will be remembered for the opening of the Tanglewood Learning Institute, the four buildings overlooking Seiji Ozawa Hall on the Leonard Bernstein camopus.

Music director Andris Nelsons will be present for the month of July, conducting 13 programs, including the world premiere of a new work by Kevin Puts, The Brightness of Light, based on letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz on July 20, and a concert performance of Wagner’s complete Die Walküre on july 27 and 28.

Mavericks thrill scant Tanglewood audience

Article updated September 4, 2019 by Dave Read

Now this was more like it – an unannounced young hard-working musician added to the bill for a concert by a band called Squeeze in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, a bill that already boasted the Mavericks, with chastened former maverick Raul Malo included in tonight’s nonet from Nashville.

We mention that this band with a heavy Latin accent is based in the home of American county music because a mere four days earlier, the guest conductor who led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in their annual summertime swansong, Beethoven’s Ninth, Giancarlo Guerrero, a native of Nicaragua, is music director of the Nashville Symphony, with which august outfit the Mavericks have shared a program!

Too often these “popular artist” programs are nostalgia trips featuring groups that once were hard-working bands but have long since become franchises that attract audiences eager to reprise that brief shining moment – high school. If you want to see something funny, come to one and watch these incurious people attempting adolescent choreography with their imminent heart attack bodies.

Musical artists are restless people who keep moving from one unique project to the next one. Popular artists are fidgety by comparison; in concert, they are more likely to tweak an act resembling the one that got them up onto the big stage in the first place. They have become faithful keepers of some golden goose. So hooray for the young musician who ignored a nearly empty Shed and cut loose for her first time on the big stage. This is for certain – she’d look insane doing the same act at seventy five!

This was a Mavericks show for us, largely because an old pal took us to see Malo in concert at the estimable Iron Horse some years ago, and we wanted to repay the favor. The advance PR described Squeeze as emerging from the second British invasion. That would put them beyond our curiosity; we’ve been burned – er, given a splitting earache, by attending shows by unknowns; by hanging around to learn what all the fuss is about.

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2019 Tanglewood schedule

Giancarlo Guerrero conducts climactic Beethoven’s Ninth at Tanglewood

Article updated August 27, 2019 by Dave Read

To close the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2019 season at Tanglewood in the Berkshires, guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero conducted the annual climactic Beethoven’s Ninth. The program opened with Arnold Schoenberg’s brief choral work Friede auf Erden, which translates to “Peace on Earth.” It has roots as a Swiss Yuletide poem, as Ode to Joy originated as a drinking song, making them perfectly suitable bedfellows for a Tanglewood afternoon!

Conductor James Burton’s Tanglewood Festival Chorus was outstanding; I am always in awe of the magnificient instrument they become, the synthesis of scores and scores of voices into some bespoke thing that pleases the senses as it moves the soul. For the Beethoven, of course, they are augmented by a solo quartet, soprano Nicole Cabell, mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges, tenor Nicholas Phan, and bass Morris Robinson.

Maestro Guerrero, a native of Nicaragua who is music director of the Nashville Symphony, conducts with a focused and bold manner. Without seeming at all histrionic, he commands your attention – there was one passage where it looked as if he were an augur boring through the podium.

The program, with the “peace on earth” preface concluding in time for the national bell-ringing, reflects the orchestra’s decision to participate in what seems like a misguided project of the National Parks Service, of all people, to mark the anniversary of the arrival in the Virginia colony of a ship carrying slaves from Africa. We say misguided because the only people who may be up in the air about slavery today are busy dismantling America’s National Parks, and generally making life miserable for everybody.

Furthermore, descriptions of the ship’s arrival in 1619 betrayed the attention to detail of a Philadelphia lawyer, because 1619 did not mark the arrival here of slavery, which was a tactic used by indigenous peoples of North America, as it was on every other continent. Slavery is more a defect of human character, than an aspect of nationality.

Hotels in the Berkshires

2019 Tanglewood schedule

Yo-Yo Ma performs Bach’s Six Cello Suites at Tanglewood

Article updated August 15, 2019 by Dave Read

Yo-Yo Ma performed Bach’s Six Cello Suites Aug. 11 at Tanglewood, one of 36 venues on six continents during his Bach Project, an initiative designed to “…bind us together as one world, and guide us to political and economic decisions that benefit the entire species.” When we reached the center of Lenox, two miles from Tanglewood and twenty minutes ahead of show time, we knew we were bound to be late.

Yo-Yo Ma performs Bach's Six Cello Suites at Tanglewood; Hilary Scott photo. — Yo-Yo Ma performs Bach’s Six Cello Suites at Tanglewood; Hilary Scott photo.

We were not alone, though, another eighteen and a half thousands attended the approximately two hour concert that was delayed half an hour. To nobody’s surprise, former cello student and local favorite James Taylor popped up for an encore – Suite Baby James, to bring about a synthesis of pop music stardom and musical artistry.

Yo-Yo Ma is far and away the brightest star in the firmament of classical music, and perhaps the world’s most important artist as well. How generous of him to devise such an ambitious enterprise, built around music composed three hundred years ago, music he recorded during the Reagan administration, music he began playing as a child in the 1950s.

With a home in Tyringham and nearly annual performances at Tanglewood, Ma is a familiar presence in the Berkshires. This is where in 1998 he began another trans-national project, the Silkroad Ensemble. Today, “Silkroad seeks and practices radical cultural collaboration in many forms, cultivating unexpected connections and fostering empathy and trust to create a more hopeful world.”

As we learned a couple weeks ago by attending the master class Mr. Ma conducted, with three Tanglewood Music Center fellows and an Ozawa Hall audience of one thousand, these compositions by Bach invite the musician to examine the full range of human emotion. While attending their performance by Yo-Yo Ma, the auditor can enter a mental realm that may be analogous to a fragrant hot bath – it alters one’s perception of their own mass, while arousing in the mind a broad smile.

So we pinched ourself at regular intervals tonight to keep alert to the performance, especially to marvel at Ma’s own expressive countenance, as varied, and with segues as imperceptable, as those in Bach’s suites. By his very nature, the artist is as restless as any citizen. With a body of work and accomplishments as broad and deep as his, Yo-Yo Ma must be a very restless fellow. Even so, we’ve never seen anybody look as contented and happy as he does, playing the cello.