May 26, 2026 11:08 AM
Sonny Rollins Passes Away at 95
Sonny Rollins, the iconic saxophonist, composer and improviser whose career stretched from the origins of bebop to 21st…
Vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant took her North Sea artist-in-residency as an opportunity to explore her fascination with early music.
(Photo: Josef Woodard)Having finally fulfilled my mission to get to the legendary North Sea jazz festival, I can confirm the rumors I’ve heard about the fest: It is a jazz glutton’s delight, and an invitation to option anxiety, given the traffic jam of possibilities spread across 17 stages, all under the roof of the vast Ahoy complex in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The festival has been variously compared to a smorgasbord, a pressure cooker, a cultural grocery store, an all- jazz encampment and an all-you-can-eat musical bazaar.
Current director Irene Peters told me, from a more official point of view, that “from the very first edition in 1976, (founding director Paul) Acket designed an indoor festival with multiple venues and a continuous flow of people, where visitors could move freely between the stages and shape their own experience. … The goal was never just scale, but density: to offer a complete, panoramic overview of jazz and related art forms in a single weekend. Artist residencies and composition commissions gave artists the opportunity to develop new work specifically for the festival.”
In its 2026 edition, the challenge of representing the current state of the complex entity that is jazz also included the festival’s own integral role in the evolution and current state of jazz: The festival can boast bragging rights for its milestone 50th anniversary year. Given the celebratory circumstance of having attained the half-century mark, the festival engaged in understandable self-reflection and showed deserved pride of product.
A fitting onramp to the festivities, early in the program, came with the Composition Project North Project, given over to Ben Van Gelder, son of iconic jazz engineer-producer Rudy Van Gelder. Van Gelder the Younger premiered his new piece, The Whole Wide World Is Round, an enticing “world music”-inspired jazz recipe, at the festival where his father (1924–2016) for many years tended his Swingmaster record store booth. Not incidentally, this is also where his father met Ben’s mother, making this space hallowed family ground.
To these ears, the pinnacle of the festival’s 50-specific programming came when Pat Metheny met young Dutch firebrand arranger Tyn Wybenga. Wybenga’s aptly named Brainteaser Orchestra served up the wild yet respectful opus Bright Size Life Reimagined, celebrating both the festival’s 50th and that of Metheny’s groundbreaking and still powerful 1976 album Bright Size Life. Metheny himself played the starring role afront this bright, crackerjack alternative big band, navigating the sometimes tricky turns of Wybenga’s charts. The inherent lyricism, chordal adventurism and inventive designs in the original tunes — recorded with the nascent Jaco Pastorius on bass and drummer Bob Moses — were sometimes taken for unexpected spins and detours through the reimagined map.
But Metheny seemed visibly moved and approving. In all, the experiment proved to be a smashingly successful double-50 birthday party, and one we’ll be excited to hear recorded evidence of at some point.
In one clear distinction from the festival’s earliest years — and up through just recent years — some of the best “men for the job” of festival highlights happened to be women. North Sea at 50 made a strong case for the importance of female voices in the current jazz scene, starting with its artist-in-residence, Cécile McLorin Salvant. Through her four diverse programs on the roster, Salvant virtually qualified as a few good women. She fared strongly in contexts we’re now familiar with — in her crackling fine quartet and in uncommonly close accord with her right-hand foil, the formidable and versatile pianist/keyboardist Sullivan Fortner.
Less expected were the lush livelihood of Salvant’s work with those Dutch masters, the Metropole Orchestra, playing music from their new release, With Every Breath I Take, and, even more surprisingly, the singer’s appearance in baroque wardrobe. As for the latter program, which she called Book Of Ayres, the singer took her artist-in-residency as a ripe opportunity to explore her fascination with early music, which she discovered while studying opera 15 years ago. She literally appeared on stage in baroque sartorial flair and outfitted the ensemble with the expanded lute instrument, the theorbo, Fortner playing mostly an actual harpsichord, percussion, and the deft Baroque recorder master Priscilla Herreid.
All in all, Salvant presented four views of a modern-day jazz chanteuse, an adventurous with musicality seemingly embedded in every breath she takes.
There were plenty of other examples of female-powered jazz, near the top of the festival game this year, including four particular women who have, in recent years, issued strong declarations of independent musical thinking, on the jazz scene and in Rotterdam this year. Guitarist Mary Halvorson filled in for the Vijay Iyer — who had called in sick — as duet partner with Wadada Leo Smith, and established a deep empathetic linkage: They must go on meeting like this.
Pianist Kris Davis, one of the clear heroic figures in this year’s festival lineup, has virtually carved out her own private path to making a fresh trajectory in the timeless inside-outside musical paradox challenge. She boldly asserted her vivid idea machine with her ace trio (bassist Robert Hurst and drummer Johnathan Blake), thrusting out whimsical, cathartic armfuls of piano notes in the encore. Vibist-leader Patricia Brennan (who also took the hot seat in the DownBeat Live Blindfold Test here, conducted by Ashley Khan) continues her artistic journey in her own inside-outside vehicle, a septet with strong ties to her Mexican heritage and a sense of an evolving rootsy-futurist jazz language all her own.
Another artist making iconoclasm work in a vibrant way is Dutch saxophonist Tineke Postma, who has made news in the past and deserves more attention in the present, for her captivating post-fusion vocabulary, and resourceful employment of the unique singer Theo Bleckmann.
From another corner of the jazz omniverse, Maria Schneider’s ever warm, inviting, personalized and challenging big band ideas arrived in Rotterdam with a Spanish/flamenco tinge here, via her collaboration with the impressive Clasijazz Big Band, and with dynamic singer and saxophonist Antonio Lizana in the spotlight. (I was also wowed by Lizano’s own fiery flamenco-spice band at the Finnish April Jazz Festival — remember his name.)
In other significant anniversary news, this year’s twin centenary year of Miles Davis and John Coltrane was given some due visibility, in different settings. Marcus Miller’s “We Want Miles!” project focused on the ’80s period Miller was a central party to, as player and composer in Davis’ world, from Tutu through the swan song album Amandla. Miller gathered appropriate allies for the tribute, Miles alumni guitarist Mike Stern and saxophonist Bill Evans, with Russell Gunn impressively meeting the challenge of filling the shoes of the man with the horn.
Terence Blanchard fills those shoes, with his effects-slathered trumpet tone, in a current Miles/Coltrane tribute project, logically complemented by guest Ravi Coltrane. The game plan, spanning material from various eras, finds the music folded into a generic fusioneering sound that Miles never approach to his own work.
In a strange way, the most impressive Miles tribute at the festival came without an official tribute agenda attached. Evocative trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær’s Nordic electro-jazz classic Khmer makes a subtle homage to Miles’ ’70s voodoo stylings without making a special point of it, along with echoing Jon Hassell’s ambient roughage and putting forth Molvær’s own signature brew. Khmer was born in 1998, well after Davis’ death, but we can speculate the late legend would have approved.
Other notables on the list of what this festgoer took in, over the course of 24 shows I caught (all of part thereof): pianistic forces of nature came in the form of ever-eloquent and chance-taking Fred Hersch and Cuban sensation Gonzalo Rubalcaba, reconvening with the all-star group featuring Chris “never a dull solo” Potter, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Eric Harland; poetic powerhouse saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, moving deftly from melodic and structured to freespirited adventures; young guitarist-singer Mei Simones summoned up a cool and fresh-feeling indie-pop-jazz-lounge aesthetic; and, ushering Saturday night into Sunday morning, the shimmeringly clad Sun Ra Arkestra (which actually played at the very first North Sea gathering) unleashed its interstellar party timing with a post-midnight finale of its anthemic “Space Is The Place.”
From my own “ones that got away” list, of shows I intended to catch but missed, great things were said about Brazilian pianist Amaro Freitas, who was awarded the 2026 Paul Acket Award — an award “presented annually to an artist who deserves broader public recognition for their extraordinary musical quality.”
For an unofficial summary note at the festival, we can quote Hersch, who joined his protégé Fortner for a late-festival Q&A session with DownBeat’s Khan: “In this time, which is so fucked up,” Hersch commented, “all we can do is to spread some joy.” Mission accomplished.
It is possible for North Sea goers to have a reasonable scheduling plan in mind, maybe carefully curate a visit and take in three or four full shows on a given day. But for jazz aficionados of any degree of seriousness, good luck: Faced with such an embarrassment of riches under one roof, in one weekend, you will want to plunge in and partake of more than is probably safe or sane.
Suffice to say, North Sea at 50 presented a fairly complete portrait of the jazz art circa July 2026. DB
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