|
Twin Cities Jazz (June 19-22, 2025)
Read More
|
On a balmy summer evening in downtown St. Paul the Twin Cities Jazz Festival kicked off its 27th year. Earlier in the week the Star and Tribune noted that the TCJF is bigger than the Taste of Minnesota and boasts more musical acts than the Minnesota Yacht Club. In fact, there were over eighty artists playing 20 venues over two days and a lot of it was free. So, it was my intention to catch five of these acts at Mears Park.
First up, Adi Yeshaya Jazz Orchestra with Jennifer Grimm. Although a local musician, Adi has a national presence as the go-to arranger for artists like Prince and Whitney Houston to Burt Bacharach and Lena Horne. He is also the musical arranger for the hit NBC show The Voice. For thirty years he was the musical director for Twin Cities local legend Debbie Duncan. Now he is working with another Twin Cities singer, Jennifer Grimm.
The orchestra started off with two Adi originals “Hi George” and “Time to Chill.” Then Jennifer stepped onto the stage dressed like she was ready for a South Carolina Cotillion. “I decided to dress up a bit,” she laughed, as they moved into Adi’s arrangement of “All of Me.”
Jennifer and Adi have known each other for thirty years and when she joined the orchestra, Adi asked what would be their first song. Knowing that he worked with the hit-making legend, Jennifer asked for a Burt Bacharach arrangement. The song Adi picked was “Alfie” from the eponymous movie.
If you are in New York on August 24th and looking for some lush orchestral music, Adi and Jennifer will be at the Birdland.
Enough cannot be said about how smoothly the Twin Cities Jazz Festival runs. As soon as Adi and Jennifer ended their set, the announcer at the Jazz 88 Main Stage swung it over to the announcer at the Jazz on 5th Street Stage. And just like that the Selby Avenue Brass Band kicked off with a brassy, funky start.
The musical director and man on tuba, Tom Wells, was a former high school music teacher in Minneapolis and he quickly brought up one of his former students (class of 88) Thomasina Petrus, and she was a live wire. She said that she is normally calm and collected, but “Once those horns start playing…”
There were original songs from Tom and Thomasina as well as a raunchy song about keys that wasn’t about keys. A highlight was “St. James Infirmary” which started with an appropriate dirge before picking up the pace with a Mardi Gras spirit until they picked up the pace even more with a blistering trombone solo and Thomasina scatting to the end.
If you are in Northfield, MN on August 2nd and need a quick jolt of energy, Tom and Thomasina will be at the Vintage Brass Band Festival.
Although there were no brass instruments, there was enough Dixieland Jazz spirit with Doreen’s Jazz New Orleans taking the main stage. Their musical leader, Doreen J. Ketchens aka Lady Louis on clarinet was joined on stage with Dorian L. Garner on drums, Leslie Martin on piano and Christian J. Mitchem on bass.
Doreen and her band have recorded 33 albums, played in 47 states and 24 countries. They’ve played for four presidents and after an interview with Ted Koppel, Doreen got her wish and played the Kennedy Center.
Doreen and her band started off with the spiritual “Lord You’ve Been So Good to Me.” Then it was set filled with too many highlights, ranging from “Caravan” to “Iko Iko” and don’t forget “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Then there was a rendition of “House of the Rising Sun” in which Doreen hoped her liver would hold as she launched into pyrotechnics on her clarinet sustaining one single note for as long as it takes to read this review.
If you are in New Orleans and want to hear Doreen’s Jazz New Orleans you can find her at 701 Royal Street every Friday-Sunday from 11am-1:30 pm. That’s if she’s in town.
New Orleans is pretty south of the Twin Cities, but the Twin Cities Jazz Festival stretched even further to Cali, Columbia to invite Las Guaracheras to the 5th Street Stage. They are a Latin Music sextet with Laura Linares on congas, Gina Botia on timbales, Elizabeth Muñóz on keys, Katherine Ortega on vibraphone, Daniela Vergara on bass and Diana Sánchez on lead vocals. If you would like to know more about them, they have a pretty cool website.
The Las Guaracheras were by far the best dressed at the festival and they immediately turned 5th Street into a ballroom. People flooded the street to dance to salsa and rumba, and it was an absolutely joyful scene.
All the songs were in Spanish and in between songs Daniela spoke to the audience in Spanish, and a lot of the people in the street understood what she was saying. I picked up bits and pieces, but in my review notes there was only one word, the word being “Wow!” If music’s sole purpose is to lift people’s spirits and get them out of their seats, Las Guaracheras hit a home run.
If you happen to be in Kalispell, MT in the middle of winter and are looking to heat up your dancing legs, Las Guaracheras will be playing at the Wachold College Center on January 15th, 2026.
Already, the day had been a success and a personal musical highlight for the year, but the main reason I came to the Twin Cities Jazz Festival was to see the Friday night headliner, the Emmet Cohen Trio with The Four Freshman.
Actually, I came to see Emmet. I first caught him playing his piano when researching for an interview with Cyrille Aimée. And in the research, I watched Cyrille and Emmet play their rendition of “La Vie en Rose”, which to me seemed like lightning in a bottle.
That was my introduction, Cyrille and Emmet playing with his trio in his Harlem apartment, a place that Emmet used as a weekly concert venue during the pandemic when all venues were shuttered. An unusual place to put on a show, but not unheard of when musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, heck any jazz musician on the NYC scene would stop by each others’ apartment to play, to learn to cross-pollinate and create a new sound.
Luckily, Emmet is on the road and playing bigger gigs, but Mears Park was just as cramped as his Harlem apartment when he and his trio took the stage with Kyle Pool on drums and Yasushi Nakamura on bass. They were there to support The Four Freshman, a singing quartet that began in 1948 when brothers, Don and Ross Barbour, joined forces with Hal Kratsch and their cousin Bob Flanigan. Seventy-seven years, 50 albums and 28 singers later, Jake Baldwin, Tommy Boynton, Bob Ferreira and Ryan Howe took the stage to highlight a collaboration they did with the Emmet Cohen Trio when they recorded enough music during the pandemic to release two separate albums.
The second volume is soon to be released, but there was plenty of music from the Volume No.1 as they sang songs from it to “Put on a Happy Face” and “Have You Met Miss Jones?”
It was a blast from the past and it felt like The Four Freshmen should have been wearing white dinner jackets and thin black bow ties while holding martinis. The crowd loved the retro sound. In fact, when they announced they were going to sing “When You’re Smiling” the guy in front of me shouted out “Oh Nice!” like he just won the lottery. Then there were more songs like the silky “Laura” and the song that put them on the map in 1952 “It’s a Blue World”.
The Four Freshmen then stepped off stage to let Emmet and his trio play their own music, and immediately the trio took off their dinner jackets and leaned into a more muscular sound.
More forceful on the keys, Emmet ran up and down the piano with block chords. Yasushi’s fingers jumped up and down the frets of his base, while Kyle looked to be in a trance as he pushed the tempo.
The rush of cascading notes was so overwhelming that a passing ambulance with sirens blaring somehow fit into the musical landscape that the trio were creating.
If you are near a computer or haven’t yet lost your phone, check out Emmet Cohen’s YouTube Channel for he’s still playing in his apartment with his trio, still inviting the who's who of jazz music, and still letting you know that jazz is fun, especially if you are “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue.”
Emmet Cohen Trio at Twin Cities Jazz Fest (June 20, 2025)
| dave 𝄞 thaddeus ♥ weheartmusic.com ♥ twitter.com |
Recent Comments