Sean Jones was smiling as he looked out across the crowd thronging Liberty Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh on Sunday night. But in his onstage remarks as in his casually spectacular trumpet playing, the man wasn’t fooling around. First acknowledging that we happen to live in divisive times, he then called on the better angels of our nature. “I see all versions of humanity right here,” he declared, with a welcoming gesture. “Right here!” The smile held amidst a roar of consensus.
This was closing night of the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival, which has convened a cross-section of the Steel City every year (save one) for the last 14.1 Jones and his hungry young quartet had just finished playing a kinetic tune with a hypnotic pulse, composed by drummer Koleby Royston. Next up was a Jones original inspired, he said, by a Bible verse about the sacred power of two or three gathered in His name; it turned out to be a murmur-glow gospel waltz titled “Two or Three.”2
I took in Jones’ music and message, admittedly, through a rolling fog of distraction: a couple of hours earlier, I’d learned that the inestimably great modern jazz composer and saxophonist Benny Golson had died, age 95. Mobilizing as one does, I’d assigned a WRTI obituary to a trusted critic in Philly, Shaun Brady. His first draft landed as Jones was taking the stage; I scrutinized it in the Docs app on my phone, while doing my best to absorb the music. (A song or two later, a member of the extended Golson family returned my call, and I had to duck around the corner to pick up.)
In spite of these circumstances, I can say that Jones’ band delivered one of the most exciting performances I heard all weekend. This was not only a function of his virtuoso trumpet playing but also, in equal measure, the result of his mentorship. Jones is chair of jazz studies at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, where two members of his quartet — the aforementioned Royston3 and bassist Aidan Taylor — are now seniors. The pianist in the group, Tyler Bullock, is a senior at Juilliard. The fiery concentration of this rhythm team, and the evident strength of their cohesion, inspired hollering approval from the crowd — before and after Jones announced that each of these formidable musicians was 21 or 22 years old.
As discussed in a pre-festival Q&A with director Janis Burley Wilson, who also runs the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh has a history of courting community, notably through free programming. Notwithstanding two ticketed concerts inside the Center, the fest took place on a pair of outdoor stages.
An ideal of sweeping inclusivity is fundamental to the event — but so too is a particular point of view, one rooted in the conviction that jazz is Black American music, and best celebrated expressly on those terms. You could infer as much with a glance at this year’s lineup, featuring the fantastic, soon-to-be-famous jazz singer Vanisha Gould, the ferocious, already-famous blues singer Shemekia Copeland, and assorted other luminaries — like bassist and vocalist Endea Owens, whose afternoon set was a soulful crowd-pleaser, and Floetry alumna Marsha Ambrosius, who followed Sean Jones as a festival closer. (I had to miss that set, because by then, I was back in my hotel room building the Golson obit.)
On Saturday night, the closer was Robert Glasper, whose long-running Black Radio project felt tuned to the fest’s humming frequency. Working with no special guests, and sadly now bereft of saxophonist-keyboardist-vocalist Casey Benjamin, he ventured his own singing — sometimes in tandem with DJ Jahi Sundance, sometimes with a light application of digital processing. This worked well enough, but it surely escaped no one’s notice that a medley of samples from the Grammy-winning Black Radio universe, notably conjuring Erykah Badu (“Afro Blue”) and Lalah Hathaway (“Cherish the Day”), elicited a more impassioned crowd response.
The biggest roar that I clocked, though, came during “I’m Dying of Thirst,” a cover of a Kendrick Lamar track with spoken-word interpolations. Among them were a compass-point quote from Nina Simone — “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times” — and an even more poignant note in the voice of a child:
“I feel proud to be brown everyday. I enjoy being brown. Especially if my skin rips, I’m thinking about brown, and I’m thinking about what color I am, but I have to be myself. You have to be happy of who you are.”
I’m not sure that I can convey the wave of joy, girded with firm determination, that moved through the crowd in response to this guileless exhortation. It was one of two or three things I know I won’t soon forget about this Glasper performance. (What else? The cool complexities and plunging velocities of Justin Tyson’s drumming, and the way it played off Burniss Travis’ imperturbable bass flow. The moment when Glasper pulled his hands off a Fender Rhodes to playfully shame a couple of women slipping away from the VIP seating area: “Where y’all going? I’m in the middle of my solo!” A fairly bonkers segue from Radiohead’s “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” into the Black Radio track “Let It Ride” into “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”)
At the risk of typecasting, Pittsburgh is something of a hard-bop town, and I noted a quotient of older folks who took in Glasper’s Dillaludes with what felt like mild skepticism. (These listeners perked up when he essayed “Body and Soul.”) I’m sure that pianist Emmet Cohen was more to their immediate liking, just as I can attest that they appreciated the powerful uplift of the Captain Black Big Band and the approachable version of jazz-funk crafted by guitarist Dan Wilson.
The festival asked me to introduce Wilson on Saturday afternoon, and I was more than happy to oblige. I pointed out that while he hails from Akron, Ohio, one of his guitar touchstones, George Benson, is an iconic Pittsburgh export. He led an ace cohort of players who appear on Things Eternal, his latest album: Glenn Zaleski on piano, Brandon Rose on bass, and Pittsburgher David Throckmorton on drums. Joining them was a fine Akron-based trumpeter, Tommy Lehman.
Another Akron native, saxophonist and composer Christopher Coles, presented his suite Nine Lives as one of the concerts inside the August Wilson Center. A response to the 2015 mass shooting at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, this piece was thoughtfully made and stirringly played, by a 10-piece ensemble that included Lehman and, as a featured soloist, Sean Jones. The morning after the concert, I joined WRTI’s associate general manager, Josh Jackson, to interview Coles and Jones for a special edition of The Late Set. So you’ll be hearing more about this soon.
Over the four days I spent in Pittsburgh, the seat of electorially critical Allegheny County, I witnessed no political enmity or social conflict. But I couldn’t help but notice that almost every commercial on television — whether I was in the hotel gym, at the sports bar, or just unwinding after a day’s festivities — underlined the stark differences between one camp and the other. Differences that matter a lot, to be clear. But the recurring beat of them, as on an anvil, sure can wear a person down.
This must have been at the back of my mind toward the end of Jones’ set, when he introduced a tune bearing the loaded title “Schizophrenia” (his own composition, I believe, not the one Wayne Shorter recorded in 1967). “Sometimes I have to turn off the TV and believe that we are better than the narrative that is out there,” Jones said, sounding both exhausted and emboldened. “We will rise together.”
Field Notes
My previous post at The Gig was a dispatch from aboard the Jazz Train — a well-intentioned foray into live video, compromised by the limits of cellular service across a swath of central Pennsylvania. You know what wasn’t compromised? The ebullient spirit that Orrin Evans, his wife Dawn Evans and the whole Imani Records gang brought aboard, and to a series of jam sessions during the fest. Pictured above are most of the key players: Evans, bassist Jonathan Michel, drummer Maria Marmarou, saxophonist Caleb Wheeler Curtis. (Not pictured: trombonist David Gibson.) The air of togetherness I’ve been alluding to in this post — not a utopian promise, just a thing that can be pressed into service — was well and truly embodied here.
Also:
A typically respectful nod to Benny Golson, from
.Why, you ask, did I miss Emmet Cohen’s set, which surely drew from his new album, Vibe Provider? Um, I was at a sports bar, surrounded by Steelers fans but watching the Eagles-Saints game. Sorry, Emmet! Today I stumbled across this post, which so beautifully eulogizes Benny Golson. Make that extremely sorry.
I mentioned The Late Set, which is about to drop a new episode (not the one from Pittsburgh, which is coming soon). Subscribe here, or with your podcast app of choice. We’re about to drop a mailbag episode, so this is a good time to catch up.
That’s it for now, but you’ll be hearing from me soon. Thanks as always for reading.
The 2020 edition, which took place in our first pandemic summer, was an all-virtual affair. Sean Jones headlined that year, too, and helped organize the artist lineup.
Matthew 8:20, English Standard Version: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”
Koleby Royston happens to be the son of drummer Rudy Royston and pianist Shamie Royston. He has obviously worked mightily to hone his talent, but it runs in the family.
I winced at the Robert Glasper comment, thinking of the notorious conversation Glasper had with Ethan Iverson several years back.