It was a big day, yesterday, for the sophisticated jazz fan.
Eleven hours of mainstream swing and traditional Dixieland flowed from the Club Pier 23 on the Embarcadero during the Bill Napier benefit, and nearly four hours of the University of California's musical potpourri absorbed the afternoon at the Hearst Greek Theatre on the Berkeley campus.
About 5000 attended the Cal "Centennial Jazz" matinee and the Napier benefit drew over 500 to the waterfront festivities.
I would wish the two events could have been shuffled occasionally: the informal enthusiasm at the Pier 23 was missing at the Berkeley show, and the modern musical experimentation was lacking on the waterfront.
In Berkeley the Grateful Dead, rock-blues group, a generally interesting and popular electronic band, was boring. In an outdoor environment with brilliant sound projection (and the Greek's naturally superlative acoustics) the Dead's presentation never grabbed the audience and took them aloft.
No one danced, nor indicated any desire to, and other than Jerry Garcia's wonderful guitar variations there wasn't anything very interesting in the Dead's hour of ordinary chord changes, occasional vocals, and undistinguished rhythms.
The Charles Lloyd quartet, in contrast, displayed superlative individual musicianship, fascinating complexities in their ensemble performance, and a wide ranging series of themes on which to improvise.
Pianist Keith Jarrett constantly taunted leader Lloyd into esoteric flute or saxophone expressions, and when Jarrett devoted his whole introductory solo space to variations on strummed-piano strings and microphonic percussion, the Greek Theatre audience roared with delight.
I have never heard Lloyd's quartet in a more exuberant mood and their artistic good humor and good taste might well have been noted by the dour Dead.
The Bola Sete trio introduced the afternoon with a typical cross section of Sete's appealing guitar. His Bach, Villa Lobos, and Haydn mixed with flamenco and Brazilian themes is one of the most attractive blends of musical expression on the American scene.
[ . . . ]
(by Philip Elwood, from the San Francisco Examiner, 2 October 1967)
* * *
A GOOD CONCERT, BUT OVER-LONG
A concert so long it lost both impact and listeners ushered in Jazz '68 at UC yesterday afternoon.
Staged in the Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus, the program was 20 minutes late in starting and then ran for nearly four hours.
Before it ended, a large portion of the 4,700 persons who attended had departed. As a result they heard none or little of the concert's stellar attraction, the Charles Lloyd Quartet.
This is the group that created a sensation at the recent Russian jazz festival in Tallin, subsequently became the first jazz group to play in the prestigious music festival at Bergen, Norway, and in two weeks will leave on a tour of [Europe].
Much of what the quartet plays might be described as avant garde music that pays heed to form and to the blues.
Lloyd plays flute, alto flute and tenor saxophone and, when occasion demands, percussion. His associates are pianist Keith Jarrett, bassist Ron McClure, and drummer Jack DeJohnette.
Their offerings included "Temple Bells," which featured the leader's scintillating flute and DeJohnette's telling use of cymbals; "Sweet Georgia Bright," a piece with a blues foundation but which was far removed from Memphis; a beautiful ballad, "Love Ship," an Indian-influenced number, "Tagore," and the lyrical "Forest Flower."
Jarrett's use of his instrument, including plucking of the strings, is remarkable, and McClure is accomplished in both accompaniment and solos.
Guitarist Bola Sete's trio began the program with an hour-long set that featured the music of his native Brazil and was enjoyable if somewhat overlong.
Next came the Grateful Dead, a leading quintet in the acid rock realm. Drawing heavily on Negro blues-rock creations, the combo is chiefly notable for the playing of its lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, and of Pigpen McKernan, who doubles organ and harmonica. There are too many instances, however, of a lack of variety in the group's offerings, and its hour-long program would have been improved by trimming.
(by Russ Wilson, from the Oakland Tribune, 2 October 1967)
Thanks to jgmf.blogspot.com
The rest of the review covered jazz acts at Pier 23. Note that 5000 attended the Dead concert, while only 500 went to see "eleven hours" of jazz bands!
ReplyDeleteElwood found the Dead a bore. He seems to be getting less impressed with them over the course of '67 - back in '66 he'd praised them for having a good beat and being "especially good for dancing," and he always complimented Garcia. But at Monterey, he protested that they "played too long" - in spite of their "fine experimental sounds" and "wonderfully rolling blues beat," they were "straying from the typical dance format." At an Oakland show, they were "pedestrian," still a step up from this uninteresting set where "no one danced."
It wasn't that he was opposed to long improvisations, since he was thrilled by Lloyd's band (and other jazz acts) - but he was bored with the Dead's "ordinary chord changes" and "undistinguished rhythms."
It could be that he caught the Dead on a bad day, or that they didn't come off so well playing next to a top-flight jazz band. Pigpen was no Keith Jarrett!
The audience itself may also have been shifting over the year, from enthusiastic dancers to listeners who'd just sit and contemplate the band. (Though they "roared with delight" at Jarrett.) This change in the rock audience was often remarked on, but Elwood may have assumed that a quietly seated audience was just as uninterested as he was.
Ralph Gleason had worried in a 9/3/67 Examiner article that rock music, like jazz before it, was becoming "more and more a show, more and more a music not to be danced to but to listen to, and going to the ballrooms became less and less involved with dancing." He feared that rock audiences would become like jazz audiences, "standing like statues digging the band. But not dancing...the music was impossible to dance to by anyone but virtuoso dancers.
"At the Fillmore and the Avalon this past couple of weeks, the halls were packed so thick it was impossible to breathe. There were no seats and one could only stand, another subway rider at rush hour, jammed in the body of the audience which was watching the bands.
No one, or almost no one, danced. There wasn't room to dance. The floor was packed with people sitting on it and the sides were packed with people standing...
[The bands are] oriented less to dancing than to the show. But...their audience sits and stands and doesn't dance."
("History May Repeat Itself," SF Examiner 9/3/67)
I'm reminded of the Midnight Hour at Rio Nido that day, with Pigpen exhorting everybody to get up and dance...maybe he needed to try that at the Greek Theatre!
I added another review of the show from the Oakland Tribune. Those were different times, when the Dead would casually open for jazz bands...and a four-hour concert with multiple bands was felt to be way too long!
ReplyDeleteBut Wilson agrees with Elwood that the Dead's hour-long set was overlong and unexciting, and that they were outshone by Charles Lloyd's band. He has some praise for Garcia & Pigpen but feels that the blues-heavy set had "a lack of variety." (Of course, half of their set might have been a half-hour Viola Lee or Caution!)