There can be powerful and transformational moments in live concerts. You never forget them. This was one of them.
Joe Lovano is the Artistic Director of the Bergamo Jazz Festival. He has given it the strapline “Sounds of Joy”, and his public role is to welcome the audience in the spirit of all of us being at (happy, Italian) family gathering, and then to do an introduction of the artists on stage.
He does all that genially and very well. But is no secret that, as a musician, he also happens to be a major figure in world jazz, and “his” festival gives also him the opportunity to sit in where and when he wants with the bands onstage. On the strength of last night’s adventure, the message for us as journalists attending the festival, is ‘hold on to your hats’ for next time it happens.
The trio of Italian pianist Antonio Faraò, bassist Ameen Saleem and drummer Jeff Ballard had been playing Faraò’s compositions, which (huge generalisation) tend to have a ‘European’, flowing, straight-eights feel. Saleem and Ballard know the idiom and both were being impeccable. Ballard was delivering a touch of magic on one tune, I think it was “Tender”, by delivering a totally controlled and infectiously powerful… and gloriously late third beat. Real craft.
But then… In walked Joe. His first skirmishes with the group were ethereal arabesques, abstract, soundscape-like. But that was a trick of the light, a mere mirage. When Lovano started to play “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise”, he instantly delivered such an overwhelmingly powerful sense of swing, it was if an all-powerful engine or beast had been unleashed. Given the hint of a swung quaver, Jeff Ballard pounces on it like a lion. Somehow we had all just leapt across the Atlantic. As I say, the transformation of this group in that moment was unforgettable.
That was just one of my highlights of the evening. The other was to hear Lizz Wright and her super group on the last date of a European tour. She has a voice and a presence which have just been brilliantly described by my colleague at The Arts Desk Mark Kidel, and I can’t do better than to quote him:
“When Wright sings “Grace”, the emotion in her voice, and the love that pours through her embody an act of humble surrender. She sings of the deepest inner truth and it’s impossible, as a participant in this age-old collective ritual, not to feel those goose-bumps that are a surefire physical expression of grace.”
I can’t get out a slide-rule and compare that performance and this one a couple of days later – after all I wasn’t there to hear the Barbican concert which Mark heard – but I was becoming convinced that this last night of the tour was delivering something VERY special. As the evening progressed, in the superb acoustic of Bergamo’s all-wooden Teatro Sociale, Lizz Wright’s vocal timbre became fuller, stronger, darker. This was a glorious show and the band – Kenny Banks Sr on piano and organ, Adam Levy on guitars, Marlon Patton on drums and Ben Zwerin bass – were ideal in all of the varied repertoire. Wright’s improbably rich deep timbre and Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” were made for each other.
