September 5 & 6, 2021
Piedmont Park, Atlanta, GA
(Monday, September 6 performances)
Jon Ross | 9 SEP 2021
Labor Day afternoon, in the center of the city, saxophonist Archie Shepp told a small crowd they were thinking about it wrong. In Atlanta to close out the two-day 2021 Atlanta Jazz Festival, which had been moved from its traditional Memorial Day Piedmont Park perch to Labor Day due to the coronavirus, Shepp said the all-encompassing moniker “contemporary African American music” aligned better with the music being presented at the event.
Archie Shepp (credit: Schorle, 2016. Wiki,edia, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Shepp, now 84, had been using the term since he arrived on the scene in 1960s New York City, rejecting a semi-pejorative that has since been derided by a long line of musicians. He explained to the crowd gathered for his Jazz 101 festival conversation that the phrase can be defined as “the instrumental music that evolved out of the work song and the spiritual.”
He expounded, “It doesn’t mean that blacks are the only people who can create and play this music, it means that we should get credit for creating the music.” French impressionism, Italian opera, German lieder are “associated with the nationality of the people who created these forms,” he said.
“In the United States, we’re reluctant to give the African American credit for his own creation.”
Disagreements over genre definitions are nothing new, but in the jazz space, that single word seems so confining now as to be laughable. The 2021 version of the festival was another data point for moving away from such a restraining definition.
On Sunday afternoon, Jazzmeia Horn began the argument with a rousing set that transformed standards like “Willow Weep for Me” and “East of the Sun (and West of the Moon)” into wholly invigorating and captivating performances of tunes long ago stamped into voluminous book of popular song. Drummer Jeremy Bean Clemons, pianist Keith Brown and bassist Eric Wheeler supported Horn’s lithe, dancing vocal runs and guttural growls, ending in a rousing “Where is Freedom!?” Due out on her soon-to-be-released big band album “Dear Love,” “Freedom” and another song from her set, “Strive,” center on social justice and protest themes that have thankfully become common place in the music.
Another common occurrence during the festival? Joy. During octogenarian bassist Ron Carter’s set on Sunday, he told the crowd how he and his phenomenal band (Renee Rosnes on piano, James Greene on tenor saxophone and Payton Crossley on drums) were celebrating getting back to normal life and finally playing for a live audience again.
During his performance, Carter weaved compositions together in long strings of sound, a mixtape of his past and present. Low-simmering tunes have always been hard to grapple with in the festive Atlanta environment, but the contrast from burning to impressionistic and vulnerable, showed how Carter is still thoughtfully shaping music after all these decades. Among the tunes, “My Funny Valentine,” which began as a single-note, solo piano recitation, evolving into a contrapuntal conversation with the bass and then, finally, the rest of the band, stood out.
A Monday set by local singer Brenda Nicole Moorer – backed by Joel Powell on bass, Jacob Deaton on guitar, Che Marshall on drums and Kenny Banks, Jr., on piano – proved to be a warmup for a mini late-summer tour spreading music from her latest release, “Marrow,” up the East Coast.
Theo Croker (theocroker.com)
Trumpeter Theo Croker’s mind-expanding set found his band working as a cooperative unit to create a soundscape of frenetic hip-hop drumming and atmospheric keyboards to prop up his soaring trumpet. Croker pulled out a standard “Never Let Me Go,” giving it the Roy Hargrove treatment by singing the last verse, before closing with “It’s Gonna Be Alright,” a message that everyone needed to hear.
Typically, the Atlanta Jazz Festival is an intensely hot and humid Memorial Day get together. Though heat and sun beat down on the treeless Piedmont Park meadow, hints of fall permeated the air. The festival also wasn’t as busy – due to both the evolving pandemic and the fact that streams of mainstage concerts were offered by Qwest TV (though I can’t vouch for the quality of those streams; an early performance on Sunday was plagued by buffering issues) – and the crowds seemed a little more spread out this year.
Mask use – maybe 5 percent – wasn’t as bad as what one might find at an Atlanta Braves game or in other, more crowded, outdoor events. But other than the very occasional masking, it was hard to know the pandemic existed. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms made a plea for vaccination from the mainstage on Sunday evening, and a vaccination booth was handing out doses to interested parties, but other than that, it was hard to tell that he pandemic is still a very real threat.
This year, the Atlanta Jazz Festival took on many messages, and the most pervasive seemed to be the hardest to wrangle: Slowly, tentatively emerging from this pandemic reevaluation of the importance of art in the public consciousness, and what the lack of live music means to a healthy society, let’s celebrate performers but also interrogate genre definitions. Is Shepp right when he implies that jazz is an outmoded term that doesn’t serve performers well? His thinking may have been in the small minority in the 1960s, but a larger cohort of musicians can likely embrace or expand upon his beliefs today.
The Atlanta Jazz Festival has always been about more than music. The Memorial Day events have been as much celebrations of the beginning of summer as a way to revel, for free, in improvised music. Concerns about the lack of masks and casual disregard for the pandemic aside, the Atlanta Jazz Festival provided a chance to once again sit on the matted grass at Piedmont Park with a crosssection of Atlanta, and wonder at the possibilities of an ever-evolving genre. ■
Jon Ross writes about jazz, pop and classical music for Downbeat magazine, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta Magazine and other publications.
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