- ZIGA KORITNIK
- Ches Smith
I spent last weekend in New York, where I attended the annual Winter Jazz Festival for the first time. The two-night extravaganza is a mind-melting showcase of contemporary iterations of jazz and improvised music—most of it made in New York—organized by Brice Rosenbloom and Adam Schatz. Having attended South by Southwest for many years, I thought I would be prepared for facing six or seven acts spread out across nine stages, all of them tightly clustered in the heart of Greenwich Village. I was wrong: the bounty of music overwhelmed me.
On Sunday night I attended Globalfest, which offers the same kind of smorgasbord for world music on three stages in the giant Webster Hall. All of these events are organized to coincide with the annual APAP conference—an industry gathering of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, in which presenters, curators, and programmers talk shop and check out artists who want to be booked or hired by them. Naturally, most of the artists have commerce in mind and have sharpened their act to broaden their appeal, which means the showbiz hokum of the Australian group Bombay Royale—with its jacked-up take on Bollywood brass music—was gag inducing. While the great Romanian brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia has honed its stage show over the years and settled into a somewhat predictable consistency, they still killed it, delivering some the most energetic and fun music I heard all weekend. I also enjoyed the buzzing Mauritanian chants of Noura Mint Seymali and the Caribbean grooves of Kuenta i Tambu (a Dutch group with roots in Curaçao), while Wu-Force—a promising new trio featuring banjo explorer (and Evanston native) Abigail Washburn, Chinese guzheng virtuoso Wu Fei, and multi-instrumentalist Kai Welch—either hadn’t gelled yet or hadn’t figured out what it was trying to do, although I’m betting it will with some time.
