Resourceful Talent on Display at South Beach Jazz Festival

By Ted Panken I Jan. 23, 2024

Opening night featured the duo of Miami native Cécile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner.
(Photo: Courtesy South Beach Jazz Festival)

Between Jan. 4 and Jan. 7, as northerners froze, Miami Beach held the (mostly) outdoors South Beach Jazz Festival. Organized with ample local sponsorship under the umbrella of Power Access, a 501(c)3 non-profit focused on people living with disabilities, SBJF’s eighth edition, which transpired at four different venues, was intelligently curated by veteran presenter James Quinlan’s Rhythm Foundation, with informed input from esteemed jazz producer Brian Bacchus.

Opening night featured the endlessly resourceful duo of Miami native Cécile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner, fresh from a five-night run with a bespoke sextet at Umbria Winter Jazz. The venue was the Hotel Faena Theater, an acoustically impeccable, burgundy-saturated Baz Luhrmann-designed space with 170 seats and a 9-foot Steinway-B. Backdropped by high-resolution projections of the 34-year-old singer’s artwork for her recent album Melusine, they delved into various corners of her repertoire, juxtaposing show tunes that jazz singers don’t often touch (“Don’t Rain On My Parade” from Funny Girl, “Were Thine That Special Face” from Kiss Me Kate, “Some People” from Gypsy, “You Can’t Get A Man With A Gun” from Annie Get Your Gun) with the French (“Petite musique terrienne” by Pierre Dansereau) and Brazilian (“Flor De Lis” by Djavan) songbooks, and songs by Burt Bacharach, Bessie Smith and Salvant herself (“Thundercloud”). Salvant’s clarity, exemplary craft, interpretive ingenuity and willingness to take vocal and conceptual risks — in short, her unfailing individualism — establishes this duo’s default basis of operations, as do the harmonically ingenious, meta-virtuosic piano responses that Fortner conjured for (as examples) “Flor de Lis,” “This Guy’s In Love With You” and “Nature Boy.”

On Friday, alto saxophonist Vincent Herring’s Something Else!, a recently configured project devoted to soul-jazz, broadly interpreted, played on the lawn of Bass Museum of Contemporary Art, situated at the southwest end of Collins Park. For the occasion, Herring augmented fellow veteran A-listers James Carter, Jeremy Pelt, Paul Bollenback, David Kikoski and Essiet Okun Essiet with drummer Hank Allen-Barfield (regulars Jeff Watts and Johnathan Blake were unavailable) and, on Hammond B-3, Matthew Whitaker, both shy of 25. That Whitaker, who is sightless, had learned and internalized every nuance of the music by ear was apparent from his opening solo on the set-launching “I’m Not So Sure,” one-time Herring employer Cedar Walton’s sinuous, harmonically challenging opus, on which he popped out the notes à la Jimmy Smith and Joey DeFrancesco, signifying with apropos smears. It foreshadowed a series of virtuosic statements incorporating diverse strategies that served the music and also captured the attention both of Whitaker’s senior bandstand partners and the audience.

Propelled by Barfield’s surefooted beats, the band played slamming, cohesive renditions of Donald Byrd’s “Slow Drag,” Freddie Hubbard’s “Destiny’s Child” and “Spirit Of Trane,” Herbie Hancock’s “Driftin’” and Pee Wee Ellis’ “The Chicken.” Herring played with customary authority, and it was interesting to hear the interplay between Carter’s relentlessly note-filled, turbulent, overtone-rich declamations and Pelt’s pithier, gold-toned statements, as well as the synchronous team-first mentality of Kikoski, Bollenback and Essiet. Less satisfying to a hardcore jazz devotee (which most of the audience were not) were this-side-of-cheesy versions of Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight” (drawn from Pieces of a Dream’s early 1980s arrangement) and John Coltrane’s “Naima.”

Saturday evening, the venue moved to the 1,000-seat Miami Beach Bandshell, where pianist Alfredo Rodriguez, a Miami resident since 2019, presented a rollicking concert for a full house framed around his fifth and latest album, Coral Way. The namesake son of one of Cuba’s most popular singers and famously a protégé of Quincy Jones, he knows how to put on a show. For this occasion, Rodriguez assembled a strong band, including the magnificent Cuban-born flutist Magela Herrera, whose several solos displayed soulfulness and improvisational virtuosity, complementing several extravagant set-pieces that showcased Rodriguez’s Lisztian piano chops. Later, Rodriguez added five members of Miamibloco, a local breathe-as-one percussion ensemble, who helped turn the proceedings into a dance party.

On the final day, under gray skies and what passes for chilly weather in Miami, the festival presented four bands consisting of eminent local musicians on the west end of the large promenade-cum-shopping mall of Lincoln Road. Leading off was pianist Brandon Goldberg, 17, who received critical accolades for his 2018 trio debut, Let’s Play, with Ben Wolfe and Donald Edwards, and his 2021 Ralph Peterson-produced quintet followup In Good Time, which both featured his well-wrought original music. On this occasion, Goldberg and a trio of 20-somethings Vincent Dupont (currently playing with Russell Malone’s quartet) on bass and Max Marsillo on drums, both adept at the codes and nuances of swing expression, played a mature, lyric-conscious set of Songbook repertoire: “I’ve Never Been In Love Before” (Loesser), “Wives And Lovers” (Bacharach) and “Dearly Beloved” and “Look For The Silver Lining” (Kern).

It would have been fun to hear Goldberg’s well-placed reharmonizations, metric shifts, subtle touch and feel for apropos tempo on the 9-foot Steinway-A at Fortner’s disposal on opening night rather than an electric keyboard. Even so, the set (though not the surroundings) evoked a late-’80s/early-’90s set at Bradley’s, the iconic New York piano saloon, where then up-and-comers like Stephen Scott, Cyrus Chestnut, Jacky Terrasson, Benny Green, Geoffrey Keezer, Mike LeDonne and Eric Reed, in the process of developing their mature voices, played related repertoire with strategies culled from similar antecedents for wee-hours audiences of elder master practitioners. As Goldberg navigated “Look For The Silver Lining” with rubato elegance, the skies opened, but he kept his composure as the rain intensified, ending the set and denying him an opportunity to showcase bebop skills on Jimmy Heath’s “Compulsion.”

The rain abated two hours later, and the proceedings resumed with the Smogies, a keyboard-electric bass-two trapset band that played set-pieces with funky and Caribbean flavors with panache and an attitude that privileged precision over creativity.

After the set, Smogies bassist Dion Kerr and drummer David Chiverton remained onstage to play with Tal Cohen, Greg Osby’s pianist of choice since the early ’10s, whose kinetic originals kept these long-time bandmates on their toes. Playing perhaps more percussively than normal in deference to the Rhodes, Cohen postulated an interesting gumbo comprising iconoclastic refractions of a broad array of post-bop and Near Eastern dialects. He started with an “Impressions”-esque uptempo swinger and a tenderly rubato “’Round Midnight,” before launching “Gevitsch” (a contrapuntal piece with many tempo and meter changes named for an Israeli dish he described as “the worst food I ever tasted”), and a Kenny Kirkland-esque burnout line that provoked Chiverton to unleash his inner Jeff Watts. He concluded with a bravura arrangement of the Israeli folk dance song “Tziporet,” which included a contrapuntal section in which he elicited a harpsichord-like tone, generating a bass line with an “Un Poco Loco” feel.

The festival ended with the South Florida Big Band, a good regional orchestra primarily consisting of faculty and elite students at Miami’s excellent Frost School of Music, led by bassist (and Frost professor) Chuck Berghofer, performing charts by trumpet master Brian Lynch, whose The Omni-American Book Club won the 2020 Grammy award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album. Fueled by a resourceful, propulsive rhythm section — Berghofer, pianist Martin Bejerano and drummer Jacob Smith — Lynch fronted on three charts from his recent Grammy-winner (“Tribute To Blue [Mitchell],” “The Struggle Is In Your Name” and “Woody Shaw”) and a new big band arrangement of “Palmieri Effect” from his 2011 Grammy-winner, Simpatico, uncorking florid, complex solos with immaculate articulation and gleaming tone. After concluding the “chops-busting” “The Struggle Is Your Name,” on which Lynch’s inflamed declamation seemed to bring him into another zone, he gave the section a break, addressing “My Shining Hour” as a quintet with tenor saxophonist Gary Keller, a long-time Frost colleague. It wasn’t quite like hearing Lynch parry with Phil Woods or soar atop Eddie Palmieri’s intervals and beats — but it sufficed. DB