August 25, 2004 performance; by Dave Read

Monty Alexander peered out from the Ozawa Hall stage at Tanglewood, saw the auditorium half full, and proceeded to deliver a concert of upbeat and optimistic music to an enthusiastic audience that occupied way less than half the hall. Such is the nature of the Jamaican-born pianist, whose reputation apparently carries insufficient weight in the Tanglewood market, despite a fifty year career, more than 60 albums as a leader, and performance credits with legends of jazz including Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, Benny Golson, and Oscar Peterson.

The concert began with a piece that quoted I Got Rhythm, begun by drummer Dennis Mackrel (Obed Calvaire was listed in the program) and bassist Hassan Shakur before Alexander made his entrance. A few minutes later, his composition Look Up seemed to be running alongside the A Train, and the next tune, Just Wait, was written in response to a successful bout with cancer.

Mr. Alexander evinced an easy rapport with the audience, even if he did seem to value his early experience with Sinatra more highly than today’s jazz fan would. And he was as generous with his sidemen as any leader could be. He stood aside while Shakur took a long ambling solo that somehow encountered The Pink Panther along the way. Other familiar tunes heard tonight were Come Fly With Me, Day O, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Sweet Georgia Brown.

The BSO was bolder than usual during the 2013 Tanglewood season with its “Popular Artist” programming. Tonight’s program had all the requisite merit on the artistic side, but as with a few earlier events, the marketing effort wasn’t up to par. That is unfortunate because, just as a full house can raise the level of excitement, a nearly empty one can be an un unhappy distraction.

August 4, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood was transformed Sunday evening into Ms. Esperanza Spalding‘s neighborhood; she is the phenom, who at age 4 made up her mind to have a life in music while watching Yo Yo Ma perform on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. A year later she had taught herself how to play violin; by 20, she was on the faculty of the Berklee College of Music; and in 2011 she won the Best New Artist Grammy, the first time it was awarded to a jazz musician.

Tonight, her neighborhood was the locale for a session of the Radio Music Society, comprised of a crackerjack 11-piece band, which takes its name from her 2012 double-Grammy release. The horn section was set up behind music stands covered by a giant radio facade. Ms. Spalding made her entrance a few moments after the band had begun laying down the hypnotic beat of Radio Song. A little later, she implored our indulgence while she got a few things off her mind, relating to “friends. family, loved ones…”. For most in the near-capacity audience, it was easy to assent to her wish, if not an outright privlege to attend to her artistry.

Going back and forth between upright acoustic bass and electric bass guitar, Ms. Spalding occupied a musical space that could evoke a range of progenitors from Willie Dixon, to Jack Bruce, to Ron Carter. And her singing is just as impressive and various, if not peerless. For an encore, she cut loose with some terrific scat in duet with pianist Leo Genovese, promising us that it would be an improvement over the previous night’s effort at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Over the course of nearly 2 hours, we were treated to an abundance of jazz that was so contextualized that if you zoomed in to a small fragment, it was indistinguishable from mainstream jazz, but when you relaxed and took the long view, the music was the dominant fragment of a larger work, and any number of sub-genres could be identified, from hip hop, to blues, to opera.

Yes indeed opera! A case could be made that opera is the most appropriate milieu for Esperanza Spalding. Besides her duly noted accomplishments as bassist, composer, and vocalist, she evinces a perfectly entertaining knack for story and drama – a sort of sturm und drang marked by a wink and a smile.

Radio Music Society followed Ms. Spalding’s Chamber Music Society, and after tonight’s performance, the last in the US, we’re left in eager anticipation of her next venture. Besides entertaining and delighting audiences, it’s probably a good bet also that she inspires young would-be musicians, because she exudes the same joy in performance as Yo Yo Ma does. How’s this for a coincidence? Mr. Ma was the featured soloist at this afternoon’s Boston Symphony Orchestra concert next-stage over in the Koussevitsky Music Shed!

June 28, 2013 performance, by Dave Read.

The Terrence Blanchard Quintet filled Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall with two sets of dense jazz before a sparse audience on June 28, 2013. It was a lovely evening in the Berkshires, but rain had been forecast, so maybe that had something to do with the nearly empty lawn and four-fifths empty hall. Has the Berkshire county reached the tipping point, where there’s so much stuff going on, that so many tickets for such an accomplished artist as Blanchard could remain unsold?

By “dense” we mean that the music made by Blanchard and his band occupied all the space available; the spacious Ozawa Hall with its renowned acoutistics sometimes seems to be accompanist, rather than mere facilitator, for a musical performance. Besides his brillance as a trumeter, Mr. Blanchard is a charming m.c., engaged with the audience, and generous to his band, which is terrific. He told a funny story about the Tuscon Jazz Society by way of introducing tenor sax player Brice Winston, a wonderful player who is heavily involved in jazz education.

Terrence Blanchard features new release Magnetic in Tanglewood performance

The rhythm section was good enough to be booking their own gigs! Pianist Fabian Almazan, from Cuba, shone especially brightly on his composition, Pet Steps Sitteres Theme Song. The tune is on Blanchard’s current Blue Note release, Magnetic, which also includes Time to Spare, a groovy up tempo composition by Winston, which got the evening underway in good order. Robert Hurst lll was on bass; his 2nd set solo was mesmerizing. Blanchard told us drummer Justin Brown “has great time” and a great career ahead. Blanchard himself demonstrated total artistic mastery of the trumpet, including loud high passages where it felt like notes bolted off the stage and became hecklers in the empty balcony.