The Stars of Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour

By Cristofer Gross

Kenny Barron, Regina Carter, Kurt Elling and Russell Malone Bring the Monterey Jazz Festival to Orange County

While any astronomer can explain how distant star clusters are formed, few musicians know what makes one jazz all-stars group soar and another implode. Now, the folks at the Monterey Jazz Festival, who began mixing high-performance headliners in 1966, have apparently found the winning formula.

The group they assembled for last September's 52nd Annual Festival included pianist Kenny Barron, violinist Regina Carter, vocalist Kurt Elling and guitarist Russell Malone. Backed by the rhythm section of bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa and drummer Johnathan Blake from Barron's trio, there was so much chemistry and cohesion that the super-sextet is now on a national tour that comes to the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall on Saturday, April 24.

A concert appearance by any one of the four stars would be a must-see main event.

Barron, who has been nominated for nine Grammy® Awards, has been called "one of the top jazz pianists in the world" by the Los Angeles Times and "the most lyrical piano player of our time" by Jazz Weekly. His career has been its own all-star tour, beginning with Philly Joe Jones while still in high school, his first Monterey appearance as part of Dizzy Gillespie's band at age 19, and on to work with Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Turrentine, Milt Jackson, Buddy Rich, Yusef Lateef and many more on hundreds of recordings, including more than 40 as leader.

Carter, who was part of Samueli Theater's inaugural season, is the most acclaimed jazz violinist today. Her five critically acclaimed discs for Verve, which show off her mastery of a range of forms, include Freefall (an album of duets with Barron), Rhythms of the Heart, Motor City Moments (a tribute to her hometown of Detroit), Paganini: After a Dream, and I'll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey (which was dedicated to her mother).

Malone is a remarkable jazz guitarist who has worked with many of the greats, including legendary organist Jimmy Smith and singer-pianists Harry Connick Jr. and Diana Krall (contributing to Krall's first three Grammy-nominated albums). While with Connick from 1990-1994, he recorded his first disc, a self-titled Columbia release that went to number one on the radio charts.

Elling has earned extraordinary acclaim for his work, which has placed him atop jazz polls for years and is uncompromising in its artistic ambitions. He constantly explores both music and language in his work. He will insert a spoken-word poem into the middle of a track or, as he did on stage in Monterey, insert Kerouac images into his vocalese. The Washington Post wrote that he has a "sense of being on a musical mission," while Jazztimes applauded his "triumphant reign as the thinking man's vocalist."

By the time the tour arrives in Orange County, the All-Stars will be a unit with close to 30 shows under their belts. However, when we talked to Elling about the tour in December, that road still stretched out before them.

"It's in progress," he told us by phone. "We obviously had to have discussions going into the performances at Monterey and that all seemed to have worked out really well. Everybody definitely needs to be featured in a certain way, so we've sent each other charts. It's definitely a collaborative effort."

Elling spoke of how he found his way into jazz. "I grew up outside Chicago in a great provincial kind of environment where the context of my interest was church people and classical music," he said. "I went to graduate school to read the philosophy of religion for three years, thinking that getting a master's degree was the way it was supposed to go. At that time I was sitting in a lot with jazz musicians and had really fallen in love with the scene. I had never expected to be a professional musician until my early 20s. I just sang for the joy of it. Then the older musicians would just put their arms around me and say, 'Man, you come back. You're with us.' And that kind of experience was not happening for me in graduate school, but it was definitely happening in the jazz world. So I really owe it to those cats for pointing me in the direction of my life, and giving me my life."

The musicians on the MJF tour all knew and respected each other before they appeared together, and during rehearsals discovered that they worked well together. Part of the cohesion was that several, including Elling, had been part of the festival's artist-in-residence program.

Elling and the MJF/52 All-Stars are going to be a very good thing. As the International Review of Music assures us, "They are not to be missed."

Crisofer Gross is a Southern California-based jazz and theater writer.

RENÉE AND HENRY SEGERSTROM CONCERT HALL
Dates: April 24, 2010
Tickets: $25 and up
For tickets and information, visit ocpac.org or call 714.556.2787.
Group sales: 714.755.0236

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