MJF/52 wrap-up: A musical feast

Originally published at Jazz Police, with a slide show of photographs by John Whiting.

Our fourth year at the Monterey Jazz Festival was as delightful as our first; more so, now that we know our way around. Meeting festival publicist Tim Orr in the press office when we picked up our credentials; greeting the Hat Man at the entrance to the Arena (dear, kind Paul Aschenbrenner, who’s been ushering for 25 years and always wears a funny hat); seeing some of our favorite vendors; running into friends; breathing the California ocean breezes; watching planes fly low over the Festival grounds; walking the half-mile or so from the Hyatt Hotel to the Festival site on the Monterey Fairgrounds…. It all felt like home.

At the 52nd annual Monterey Jazz Festival—that’s 52 years without a break, making MJF the world’s longest-running jazz festival—the economic downturn was in the air, like the smoke from the Cuban/Caribbean kitchens, the Korean barbecue, and the ribs vendor. Sometimes (especially Friday evening) the crowds seemed smaller, and for the first time in the Festival’s history, you could buy single tickets to Arena events.

I thought perhaps the number of performances was down as well, but checking past years’ schedules, I see I was wrong. As always, there was more to see and hear than we could possibly fit in, simply because we couldn’t be in two or three places at once.

Toughest choices: The Monterey Jazz Festival All-Stars (Kenny Barron, Regina Carter, Kurt Elling, and Russell Malone) or the John Patitucci Trio with Joe Lovano and Brian Blade? I’m a big Kurt Elling fan and John (my photographer husband) knows better than to try talking me out of that, so we saw the All-Stars. Forro in the Dark or pianist Jonathan Batiste? We caught a few moments of Batiste earlier in the evening so went with Forro (who performed in Minneapolis at the Cedar Cultural Center on Friday the 25th).

Staying for the first part of Pete Seeger’s performance—not jazz, but deeply meaningful for many in the audience—meant missing much of a conversation about the history of Blue Note Records with journalist Ashley Kahn, Blue Note’s Michael Cuscuna, vibes master Bobby Hutcherson, and saxophonist Joe Lovano. Picking pianist Vijay Iyer over the Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke & Lenny White trio might seem insane, but we had seen Corea/Clarke/White at the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis earlier this month, and Clarke/White return in October with pianist Hiromi. Plus I was curious about Iyer, and my curiosity was amply rewarded. What a fine, exciting, complicated, intriguing, satisfying young pianist he is.

We went to Buffalo Collision on Sunday afternoon because we had missed them at the Dakota the night before. The group—Ethan Iverson on piano, Dave King on drums, Tim Berne on saxophone, Hank Roberts on cello—finished playing in Minnesota around 1 a.m. on Sunday, caught a few Zs, then an early flight to California for their 5:30 p.m. Monterey set on the open-air Garden Stage.

Many people who experienced Buffalo Collision’s unique brand of avant-garde music didn’t care for it, to put it mildly. Props to MJF’s Tim Jackson for bringing the Festival into the 21st century with performers like BC and Jason Moran, this year’s commission artist. Moran’s “Feedback” (jazz trio mixed with the looped and manipulated sounds of Jimi Hendrix’s feedback from the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival) also drove some Festival attendees to the exits. They returned later for Dave Brubeck’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of “Time Out.” As I looked out over the Arena crowd, it seemed that all 6,500 seats were full for that event. MJF loves Brubeck and it’s mutual; he’s been a friend to the Festival from the beginning.

We chose Moran over a performance by the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Quartet; both were scheduled for 7 p.m. on Saturday. That one really hurt. I’ve never seen Akiyoshi perform, but at least I was able to hear her speak earlier in the afternoon, in a conversation hosted by journalist Yoshi Kato. We learned how a Japanese girl growing up in Manchuria in the 1930s and ’40s fell in love with jazz and started on her path to NEA Jazz Master. Think about that.

High points: Russell Malone’s achingly beautiful take on “Time After Time.” When Malone plays a ballad, he’s a dangerous man. The infectious rhythms of Forro After Dark. Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra: a peerless performance, plus a sweaty hug afterward from bassist Carlos Henriquez (and, later, running into much of the band at the Hyatt Hotel lobby bar). Seeing Elling sprawled on the lawn among the picnic tables. Dee Dee Bridgewater’s no-holds-barred late-night show at Dizzy’s Den. Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez’s ravishing version of “Body and Soul.” Moran, Tarus Mateen, and Nasheet Waits, always exciting. Vijay Iyer.

Low points: The afternoon sun baking my head during Scofield’s Piety Street Band set in the Arena. Not being able to see/hear everyone/everything I wanted—Raul Midon, Ruthie Foster, the screening of the new Oscar Brown Jr. documentary, the Peter Erskine-Alan Pasqua Trio, Akiyoshi and Tabackin, Soulive with John Scofield, more of dishy young trumpeter Dominick Farinacci, more of Jonathan Batiste. And finding out too late that the chowder cart also sold lobster rolls. Besides all that, the Festival was perfection.

MJF/52: Day Three at Monterey

Originally published on jazz.com.

In the early evening, just before Jason Moran takes the stage in the Arena for his 2009 Monterey Jazz Festival commission, Clint Eastwood walks by. A man beside us at the bratwurst booth says, “Now I’ve gotten my money’s worth.” He laughs, but no Monterey experience is complete without at least one sighting of Eastwood, who has been a friend of the Festival for so many years.

Our day begins at a conversation between NEA Jazz Master Toshiko Akiyoshi, who turns 80 next year, and journalist Yoshi Kato. This is another thing that makes Monterey special: opportunities to hear from jazz greats like Akiyoshi and (yesterday) Bobby Hutcherson in the relaxed setting of Dizzy’s Den. We learn about Akiyoshi’s childhood in Manchuria; her early love of the piano; how, when she was 16 years old, a record collector named Mr. Fui invited her to his home to hear a recording of Teddy Wilson playing “Sweet Lorraine.” To Akiyoshi, each note was a pearl.

She tells us about her first recording and how Downbeat gave the album three stars and its cover five stars. That “it’s good to have music knowledge but…the most important thing is to have a musical mind, a musical attitude.” Kato asks about her 40-year relationship with Lew Tabackin, her husband and band member. “Every great band has a great soloist,” she says. “Lew is a supreme tenor player and a supreme flute player.”

I don’t know Akiyoshi’s music and won’t hear her play this year—her performance is scheduled at the same time as Moran’s in the Arena—but spending an hour in a room with her, listening to her stories and being in her presence, has made me want to listen to her music. Akiyoshi fans, I’m open to suggestions on where to start.

The Alfredo Rodriguez Trio is performing on the Garden Stage. A friend heard Rodriguez solo at the Detroit festival a few weeks ago and raved. Rodriguez’s story is fascinating. In January of this year, he defected from Cuba, leaving his family and friends, risking arrest, deportation, and imprisonment.

Backed by Nathan East on bass and Francisco Mela on drums, he plays two originals; then East begins a low, soft solo that whispers “Body and Soul.” We have to listen hard to hear it; planes fly overhead, it’s an outdoor stage, and the crowd in the nearby food court is noisy. But it’s worth it. And when the piano enters and Rodriguez brings his own interpretation to the American jazz standard, you can hear his great love of this music.

We can spend only a few moments with trumpeter/flugelhorn player Dominick Farinacci in the Coffee House. Just 25, the Juilliard grad recently released his first U.S. album, Lovers, Tales & Dances, which features jazz greats including Kenny Barron, Lewis Nash, and Joe Lovano. (Farinacci previously made six albums as a leader in Japan.) He connects well with the crowd and his tone is warm and golden. With Dan Kaufman on piano, Yasushi Nakamura on bass, Carmen Intorre on drums, and Matthias Kunzli on percussion, he plays Piazzolla’s lovely “Libertango,” followed by a blues. Kunzli’s percussion adds new layers of sound and rhythm to the standard quartet.

Buffalo Collision played the late show last night at the Dakota in Minneapolis, then took an early flight west to make their afternoon date at the Garden Stage. Probably the most outside group at the Festival (I say “probably” because I haven’t heard everyone, but it’s a safe bet), Buffalo Collision is pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer Dave King (both of The Bad Plus), saxophonist Tim Berne, and cellist Hank Roberts, all monster improvisers. This show will later get at least one scathing review (“I’ve never witnessed a set so hostile to the notion of melody”) but to me it’s bliss.

Monterey took risks this year by booking Buffalo Collision and commissioning Moran, whose work is known to be progressive, but jazz is not made by Brubeck alone. I wonder how Ornette Coleman was received when he first played the Festival in 1959.

Buffalo Collision plays four or maybe five pieces during their hour-long set; it’s a little hard to tell and it doesn’t really matter. At one point Iverson stands and leans inside the piano, doing something with the strings—plucking? pressing?—while King and Roberts explore the outer limits of their instruments. Roberts coaxes sounds out of his cello that would have Rostropovich spinning in his grave: screams and growls, clicks and groans. For a time, his cello sounds like a stringed Chinese instrument.

There is an underlying rhythm to this music but who’s making it? Without a bass player, the timekeeper’s job logically falls to King, but that’s not where he’s at. Yet the rhythm exists somewhere between the notes, like a sympathetic vibration. It must exist because I’m tapping my foot.

The music rises and falls, with solos and duos and full-blast ensemble sections, blending tenderness and wit, cacophony and lyricism. In between are interludes by Roberts, like rope bridges stretched over canyons. Hold on, don’t look down, and you’ll make it safely to the other side.

In the Arena, Jason Moran and Bandwagon are playing a tune by Moran’s teacher Jaki Byard. It’s a warm-up for the reason they’re here: for “Feedback,” this year’s Festival commission. Moran is a risk-taker, an experimenter, a thinker, drawing freely from all of the resources available to him; standards, history, the Jazz Loft Project archives (for his recent In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959), technology, his own prodigious and playful imagination.

I see him whenever I get the chance; he often comes to the Walker Art Center, which has also commissioned new work by him, for performances and conversations with performing arts curator Philip Bither.

Tonight Moran tells us that Jimi Hendrix played this very stage in 1967 at the Monterey Pops festival. “I was intrigued by his performance and how he used the technique of feedback,” Moran explains. “He worked it into all of his music. I took all these sections where he used feedback and chopped them up.” He warns us that it might get loud, we might want to cover our ears, we might even want to leave. Several people do leave, but for those of us who stay, it’s a fascinating and rewarding experience.

Loops of feedback moan and screech, buzz and hum. Over them, Moran and his trio, the Bandwagon—Tarus Mateen on electric bass, Nasheet Waits on drums—play intelligent, melodic trio music. Moran moves between the big Yamaha grand and a Fender-Rhodes. The mood shifts from poetry to funk. Then Moran howls into the mic before inviting the audience to participate in the piece. One side of the crowd, he says, should sing a single note—a low ahhh. The other, a rising and falling whoop. They oblige. Human feedback, live and in the moment.

We spend ten minutes with the Shotgun Wedding Quintet—jazz meets rap, big band and boom-bap, tons of fun—before heading back to the Arena to see Dave Brubeck receive an Honorary Doctorate from Berklee College of Music. “A while ago I was offered an honorary doctorate,” Brubeck says, wearing full academic regalia, “and I asked my brother, ‘Should I accept it?’ He said ‘Do—you’ll never earn one.”

When the curtain opens again, it’s on the Dave Brubeck Quartet: Brubeck on piano, Bobby Militello on alto saxophone and fluted, Michael Moore on bass, Randy Jones on drums. “I told my group we would play Ellington,” Brubeck says by way of introduction, “and asked them to please just follow me wherever I go.” A lively “C-Jam Blues” segues into “Mood Indigo” and “Take the A-Train.” They don’t play like young men—they don’t have the speed or the elasticity—but they play like the pros they are, with joy and generosity and mastery. And Militello still blows like a typhoon.

We’ll hear the end of the set—and the expected, beloved, thunderously applauded performance of “Take Five”—over the speakers inside the Coffee House, where we’ve gone to hear the Vijay Iyer Trio. Remember, Monterey is about choices, often hard choices. I’ve seen Brubeck often, Iyer only once, and I’ve been reading so much about Iyer’s trio and their new CD Historicity that I’m dying of curiosity.

Iyer is said to make complex, mathematical music (he has his B.A. in math and physics from Yale), and the radio announcer who introduced him quoted Iyer as saying “Music is mathematics in action,” but I don’t hear math. I hear beauty and emotion. Julius Hemphill’s “Dogon A.D.,” an original Iyer work, “Questions of Agency,” selections from Historicity. Solid, supple, expressive, inventive, intriguing stuff, played as one by Iyer, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and bassist Matt Brewer (replacing, without explanation, regular trio bassist Stephan Crump).

Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, and Lenny White are still playing in the Arena when we leave the Coffee House, but I’m more than content with Iyer as my final Monterey show. We hang out for a while on the grounds, talking with friends, stepping briefly into Lyons Lounge, where DJ Logic is unplugging his equipment, watching the vendors tear down and pack up. Even at this late hour, if you want, you can still buy chili, a cup of green tea, or sweet potato fries. 

MJF/52: Day Two at Monterey

Originally published at jazz.com.

The weather changed on the hour and the music was just as eclectic on the second day of the Monterey Jazz Festival. Morning haze gave way to hot afternoon sun in time for John Scofield and the Piety Street Band, fog rolled in and saved my brain from boiling (the Arena is open-air), the temperature fell along with the evening, and by the time the big red curtain opened on Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, people were wearing coats and gloves. The Festival is its own collection of microclimates.

We enter the Arena in time for “The Angel of Death,” guitarist Scofield’s take on the Hank Williams tune. He introduces it as “the scariest song he knows” but it’s hard to be scared in a happy crowd of people in floppy hats and sunglasses.

I have not been a close follower of Scofield, my bad, but I do like this group. Rootsy, rollicking, soulful. The set closer, “It’s a Big Army” (“I’m a soldier in the army of love/I’m a soldier in the army”), rocks the audience. Roland Guerin takes a slappy bass solo, drummer Shannon Powell bangs the tambourine, and pianist/organist Cleary shouts the lyrics. I want to be a soldier, too.

Next up in the Arena: one of the Festival’s most anticipated events, the first-ever appearance here of folk music icon Pete Seeger. I’m not a folkie but I hold Seeger in highest respect for his lifelong political activism, plus he has written some fine songs: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!” His band is family and friends; at one point, his guitarist (and grandson) Tao Rodriguez-Seeger urges, “Come on, Grandpa, play some banjo for me.” Standing at stage left, out of the sun, we hear “Midnight Special” and Woody Guthrie’s “Dustbowl Blues.”

Off to a conversation at Dizzy’s Den: “70 Years of Blue Note Records.” On stage: host Ashley Kahn, Blue Note’s Michael Cuscuna, and two great Blue Note artists, Bobby Hutcherson and Joe Lovano. Kahn lets his guests do most of the talking and they share stories and memories.

By now we’ve met up with friends and spend the next couple of hours parked at a picnic table in the grassy food court. The open-air Garden Stage is nearby and the music of Ruthie Foster is our soundtrack. It’s glorious. According to Festival tradition, the end of the table we’re not using is taken over by a changing cast of characters bearing chicken wings, mud pie, and stories of why they’re here and what they’re enjoying.

The first Arena show of the night was originally pianist Hank Jones and the Joe Lovano Quartet. When Jones cancelled for health reasons just before the Festival began (he recently played the Detroit Jazz Festival, lucky Detroit), Scofield stepped in. So the set we hear is completely different from what it might have been.

With the dream team of John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums, the group powers through Lovano’s “Fort Worth,” Scofield’s “Since You Asked,” and what I think is a Monk tune. Lovano starts the set by telling us what they were playing, then stops, caught up in the music. (Not for the first time, I submit this humble request on behalf of writers everywhere: Please, mighty jazz greats, take a second and tell us what you’re about to play or have just played.) It’s raucous and wailing, a showcase for four remarkable musicians; at one point, Lovano plays two soprano saxophones simultaneously. People sitting near me think it’s a bit too squawky.

The group Wayne Wallace and Rhythm & Rhyme takes a long time setting up on the Garden stage, and we soon know why: It’s a big Latin band, complete with at least twelve musicians and seven vocalists. This is a group I don’t know, chosen partly because when we duck into the Night Club for the Ambrose Akinmusire Quintet (with the wonderful Gerald Clayton on piano), it’s steamy inside. So we wait while the crew brings out what seems like an endless supply of microphones and instruments, then someone tests every microphone, and finally the band members take their places.

A big Latin band is a thing of beauty, its leader the eye of a musical hurricane. Seeing Wallace, I’m reminded of the estimable Pancho Sanchez. A lot of people play a lot of instruments and several rhythms simultaneously. It’s exciting. I’m especially interested to see a woman saxophonist on the front line, and I’m sorry I don’t catch her name.

The band plays music from their acclaimed CDs, The Reckless Search for Beauty and The Nature of the Beat, including Wallace’s arrangement of Gerry Mulligan’s “Jeru,” Duke Ellington’s “A Chromatic Romance,” and Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm.” They throw in something by Earth, Wind & Fire. Wallace calls them “transmogrified songs,” a perfect description for what we’re hearing: tunes we think we know turned into something new.

It starts out a bit uneven and fusiony (to my ears) and at first I wonder how long I’ll stay on the cold, hard metal Garden Stage bench, but I’m soon won over by Wallace and his band, who now have two more fans in Minnesota.

We think we might be late for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at the Arena but we’re just in time. The curtain opens on a band that gets better every time I hear it. It’s JLCO’s first time at Monterey since 2001 (when the Festival happened very soon after 9/11; I wasn’t present for that one but it must have been something). Tonight they’re all heat and excitement and precision, a wall of brass held together by the splendid rhythm section of Dan Nimmer on piano, Carlos Henriquez on bass, and Ali Jackson on drums.

The set is simply thrilling from the first notes of Kenny Dorham’s “Stage West” (arranged by the fine young trombonist Vincent Gardener) through Henriquez’s final notes on his arrangement of Joe Henderson’s “Shades of Jade.” In between: Lou Donaldson’s “Blues Walk” (arr. Sherman Irby, so swinging), Wayne Shorter’s “Free for All” (arr. Wynton Marsalis), and Lee Morgan’s “Ceora” (arr. Ted Nash). Nash’s take on this tune is sweet: breathy flutes, muted trumpets, room for a sparkly solo by Nimmer. Say ahhh.

The band is billed as Jazz at Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis, but nearly everyone had his turn in the spotlight tonight. The whole set was ridiculously stellar. I stood the entire time (at the side of the stage) and if they were still playing I’d still be standing.

It’s late. After midnight. Time to head back. But first, a Dee Dee Bridgewater nightcap. She’s playing at Dizzy’s Den (her second set of the night; she preceded JLCO in the Arena), it’s on our way to the gate, and she must be wrapping things up by now, right? Wrong. She’s just getting started and she’s on a tear.

I’ve seen Bridgewater several times before—an October 2007 date at the Dakota with her Malian project has a permanent place on my Top Five list of live music performances—but never as she is tonight: Dee Dee unbound. She sings, she talks, she flirts with the audience, she flirts with her band: Edsel Gomez on piano, Ira Coleman on bass, Vince Cherico on drums, Luisito Quintero on percussion. She tells us about her upcoming divorce (her third), she scats and growls, she makes her voice a horn, she fills the room with her personality and broad, sweeping gestures. She pulls no punches and she’s spicy tonight, a little too spicy for some people. The man sitting next to me hates her. And yet, he doesn’t leave.

We get a taste of her forthcoming CD, a tribute to Billie Holiday. “All Blues.” “Speak Low” from her Kurt Weill project. “My Favorite Things,” Dee Dee style—not the perky whiskers-on-kittens ditty but a dangerous song about a girl who knows what she wants and you’d better not stand in her way. She follows with a down-and-dirty “Dr. Feelgood” blues. And finally a magnificent “Afro Blue.”

We stagger out the door at 1:45 a.m., after the patient stage manager (a 25-year veteran of the festival) has politely asked Gomez to politely ask Bridgewater to please wrap things up so folks can go home. I’m guessing this is one of those Monterey shows that will go down in the history books. Dee Dee Bridgewater, force of nature, shaved-head warrior queen. 

Hats for Cats: Ethan Iverson

When Buffalo Collision (Ethan Iverson, Tim Berne, Hank Roberts, Dave King) played the Dakota late-night shows on Friday and Saturday, Ethan heard we'd be at the Monterey Jazz Festival, where the group was scheduled to perform on Sunday afternoon. He had his hat with him, brought it along, wore it onstage, and made my day.

MJF/52: Day One at Monterey

Originally published at jazz.com.

There are many ways to experience the Monterey Jazz Festival: as a sit-down meal of many courses, as a buffet, as a snack tent (like the new-this-tear Taste Tent on the Midway, where you can sample foods and beverages from a variety of festival partners). This is my fifth year here and I should have a routine by now but I don’t.

The happy problem with Monterey, and any festival where you have to make choices, is you have to make choices. You can’t be in two places at once, or in this case six, the number of venues where you can hear live music. I start with a plan but it always falls apart as I’m distracted by a new name, a buzz, or sounds coming out an open door.

On Friday, the opening night of the three-day festival, we enter through Gate 3 and duck into the Night Club for a few moments with the Scott Amendola Trio. Screaming guitar. Too much, too soon. I learn later that the show worked up to this level of frenzy and had we been there from the beginning it would have been fine. I promise to get a CD.

Next brief stop, the Garden Stage for the Berklee-Monterey Quintet 2009, a reminder of the MJF’s ongoing commitment to jazz education and featuring young artists. (Much of Sunday afternoon will be devoted to performances by young artists.)

My photographer husband and I catch the end of New Orleans piano player Jonathan Batiste’s first set at the Coffee House Gallery. (At the Coffee House, artists tend to stay put for the evening, playing more than one set.) A bit of “We Shall Overcome,” then something in which Batiste sings “you got to hold on.” He sings, he plays piano with his hands and his fists, he plays melodica and piano at the same time. He’s amazing.

His fired-up band includes Eddie Barbash and Matt Marantz on saxophones, Philip Kuehn on bass, Joseph Saylor on drums, and someone on trombone whose name I didn’t catch. All look almost too young to be out without their mamas.

It’s near the end of Esperanza Spalding’s set at the Arena. This year, the young bassist/vocalist/composer is the Arena opener, a sign that You Have Arrived. We saw her earlier this year at the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis, and she also played the Twin Cities Jazz Festival in June, an outdoor event during which Prince sat in his limousine behind the stage, listening and calling her on his cell phone.

Earlier, as we walked toward the Monterey County Fairgrounds, the Festival site, we overheard a woman ahead of us tell her companions “Esperanza Spalding is a good bass player, but she also wants to be a singer, and if she asked me, I’d tell her to stick to the bass.” Perhaps she felt differently after tonight. Spalding’s singing and bass playing are intertwined. Although I can’t begin to understand how someone plays bass the way she does and sings at the same time, which often includes complex scatting, I’ve seen it enough to believe that this is who she is and how she expresses herself. Her supportive and intuitive band is Lee Genovese on piano, Ricardo Vogt on guitar, Otis Brown on drums.

The Arena’s second event of the night, one we’ll see in full, is this year’s version of the Monterey Jazz Festival All-Stars supergroup: Kenny Barron on piano, Regina Carter on violin, vocalist Kurt Elling, and Russell Malone on guitar, with Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass and Johnathan Blake on drums. As the curtain opens, the band is already playing and Elling is already singing: “My Love, Effendi,” his vocalese spin on the McCoy Tyner tune. He slides from words into scatting, which many in the audience have come to hear (someone yells “Go, Kurt!”).

Throughout the set, Elling acts as unofficial emcee, announcing the group members and occasionally passing the mic to someone else. He and Carter take the spotlight for the lovely old Sigmund Romberg/Oscar Hammerstein song “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” after which Carter and Barron play a ballad that acts like a big, gentle, quieting hand on the crowd; it seems that everyone listens and no one wants to miss a single sweet note from Barron’s piano or sigh from Carter’s bow.

Malone is featured next in a quartet with Barron, Kitagawa, and Blake, then the mic goes to Barron, who announces his original composition “What If?” It’s a Monkish tune that opens up midway for an Elling vocalese that begins “What if Jack Kerouac showed up tonight with his pockets full of snippets of ideas?” Then he tosses out several—“Girls running up library steps with shorts on,” “boys smashing dandelions with a stick,” “all day long, wearing a hat that was not on my head,” “drunk as a hoot owl, writing letters by thunderstorm”—and someone in the band responds to each in a playful back-and-forth.

More highlights of this generous set—for which, Elling explains, the group prepared with only two short rehearsals together, “but together we probably have over 300 years of rehearsals, all so we could be ready for you tonight”—include the saucy Jon Hendricks/Horace Silver collaboration “Soul Food,” and Malone’s take on “Time After Time.” After a naughty introduction—something about an older singer who taught him how to treat a ballad like a kiss—Malone does that thing he does: plays guitar so beautifully you could swoon. Backed by Barron, Kitagawa, and Blake, he hands us soft, feathery notes, delicious chords beneath the melody, and an elegant ending.

All four of the All-Stars shine tonight, but it’s Malone who steals my heart.

Festival director Tim Jackson has made Forro in the Dark one of his Top Ten picks, so we head next to the Night Club. Forro is the rural party music of northeastern Brazil, and this Brooklyn-based group of Brazilian expats probably isn’t used to playing to a seated crowd. They urge us to get up and dance, and a few do, but it’s hard on a carpeted floor. This is a fun, energetic group I would like to hear on their home turf, which for now is the East Village nightspot Nublu, where they play weekly.

As they update the sounds of their traditional music, they do it with a blend of new and old instruments: electric bass and guitar, pifano (bamboo) flute, zabumba (a type of bass drum that is worn by the musician and played on both sides), saxophone, percussion. They play originals, at least one song by Caetano Veloso, and a ballad.

The band members are Jorge Continentino on saxophone, pifano flute, and vocals; Joao Erbetta on guitar an vocals; Gilmar Gomes on percussion and vocals; and Adriana dos Santos on zabumba and vocals. The only non-Brazilian among them is bassist/vocalist Masa Shimizu, who’s originally from Tokyo and met the others in NYC. The house is nowhere near full but no one is sitting still.

Across the way at Dizzy’s Den, Esperanza Spalding is still playing her second set of the night, and we score seats near the front in time for her final tune, the audience sing-along she’s becoming known for: She scats a simple phrase, we repeat, another, repeat, and then she lets loose with a long, showy verse that makes everyone gasp and laugh. It’s a joyous end to the evening.

Back at the Hyatt, the hotel where most musicians stay (it’s within walking distance of the fairgrounds), the bar is full and noisy. We spot Regina Carter right away; Kurt Elling walks in wearing a white baseball cap. New Orleans pianist Henry Butler, who performs on Saturday evening, plays “Caravan” on the piano; Jonathan Batiste joins in on his melodica. My only regret: missing the John Patitucci Trio earlier tonight, which I’m already hearing was awesome.

Random first-night memories: Tepanyaki rice bowl from the Korean BBQ booth. The kids at the Best Buy tent (Best Buy is this year’s seller of CDs) playing “The Beatles: Rock Band” game and paying no attention to the jazz on the Garden Stage across the way. The Hat Man at the Arena gate, wearing a felt moose head hat and telling everyone “It’s my chocolate moose.” A couple here for the first time, wondering what to hear and see, up for anything. That’s the spirit.