ElSaffar is an alchemist with an inquiring mind all his own.
Hailed by Down Beat magazine as “an exquisite alchemist” for his magical blend of traditional Middle Eastern motifs with free-wheeling jazz elements, the Iraqi-American, Chicago-born trumpeter/composer Amir ElSaffar has made a breakthrough discovery with his latest album, Crisis (Pi Recordings).
What ElSaffar, a classically trained trumpeter and post-bebopper who has immersed himself in Iraqi music, culture, cuisine, history, and the Arabic language, has discovered through his wide travels and studies with grand old masters of ancient musical traditions is a brave new world of his own making.
Instead of simply using world music as a kind radical chic veneer for improvised musings, ElSaffar -- an alchemist with an inquiring mind all his own -- relies on his own creative juices as the prime catalyst for his inventions in his wizard role as musician, composer, bandleader, and perpetual scholar.
Besides diligently honing his trumpet techniques to meet the technical demands of his Middle East explorations, he’s also mastered the art of ancient vocal styles as well as the use of the santur (a traditional Middle Eastern hammered dulcimer).
Literally reinventing himself through his cultural and musical studies, he’s become not just another synthetic synthesizer of thesis and antithesis, but an original artist who creates a new precious metal that, without ever debasing its basic working elements of Middle Eastern and Western traditions, assumes a unique value all its own.
Celebrating Crisis, a suite that was commissioned in 2013 by the Newport Jazz Festival, ElSaffar makes two stops in our area this week as he tours with his exceptional band, Two Rivers Ensemble.
ElSaffar and his ensemble, whose name alludes to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, perform on Thursday, September 24, at 7:30 pm at Community Music School of Springfield at 127 State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. The concert is presented by Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares, a grass-roots organization and major jazz booster in western Massachusetts, which funds its events through selling jazz shares to its supporters to raise capital for its concerts. Tickets $15.00. Individual tickets and shares are available at jazzshares.org and at the door.
On the next day, ElSaffar and Two Rivers journey south to New Haven where they present their electrifying eclecticism in two separate sets on Friday, September 25, at 8:30 pm and 10:00 pm at Firehouse 12 at 45 Crown Street. Tickets $20.00, first set; $15.00, second set. Information: firehouse12.com and (203) 785-0468.
As a composer, ElSaffar is blessed with a tight-knit band that’s more than up to the challenge of the Middle East traditions of microtones, modes, shifting time signatures, dramatically diverse moods, and profound historic themes -- everything from war and peace -- to a full palette of jazz colorations.
The band's wide-ranging jazz expressiveness moves easily from the sort of beautifully brushed impressionism and lyrical melancholy of Ornette Coleman’s "Lonely Woman" to -- in one whirling vortex of an instant -- evoking the abstract expressionist fury of John Coltrane’s Ascension.
ElSaffar’s band of brothers -- a group that is totally in tune with the maestro’s spiritual and aesthetic quest to find some kind of uncommon yet common ground that reveals the new in the old and the old in the new -- features: the leader on trumpet, vocals and santur; Carlo DeRosa, bass; Nasheet Waits, who continues the artistic legacy of his late father, the great drummer Freddie Waits; Ole Mathisen, tenor and soprano saxophones; Tareq Abboushi, buzuq (long-necked lute); and Zafer Tawil, oud and percussion.
The suite’s scope runs wide and deep. It is described in press material as ElSaffar’s reflections on sectarian violence and civil war, themes of turmoil, death, and destruction accented by such ominous titles as "From the Ashes," "Flyover Iraq," and "Tipping Point."
It’s a sonic version of Goya’s "Disasters of War" dealing with the bleak universal themes of chaos and discord.
Yet for all its dark overtones, it also flows with deep, swiftly running currents of beauty, a mesmerizing spirit and lyrical poetry flourishing among the legacy of ashes. It even contains a "Love Poem" by a Sufi mystic whose themes are beauty, vulnerability, tenderness and longing.
An expansive, highly ambitious work, the suite can’t be crammed into any conventional category, ranging from such all-purpose, shop-worn labels as fusion and world music. A quite serious, cerebral piece, it is also fueled with deep emotion -- visceral feelings that you can hear simmering without even being aware that on a piece like "The Great Dictator," the complexly unfolding folk rhythms are constantly shifting in 7/8, 10/8, 12/8, 4/4, 9/4 and 5/4 time signatures.
ElSaffar, in the liner notes, provides helpful guideposts along the way, explaining the music’s narrative elements with such illustrative, cryptic, warlike metaphors as “tabla enters with machine-gun precision;” or “saxophone is sent into a hysterical frenzy percolating;” and “shards of glass in buzuq, oud references.” Or, in a celestial or visionary mood, “Angelic brass enter with two iterations of Super-Major triads (major triads, outer notes expanded outward by a quarter tone).”
It really doesn’t matter if you don’t know a microtone from a microwave or an oud from an owl. Just sit back and enjoy the rich, flowing narrative created by ElSaffar and the Two Rivers Ensemble, stories as new as the 21st century, as old as the cradle of civilization.
Sassy Sardines Sizzle at UMass
The Hot Sardines, a white-hot vintage jazz and pop band with an extra dry martini wallop lacing its intoxicating sound, romps joyfully through the music of yesterday -- rejuvenating anything and everything from Fats Waller’s classic version of "Your Feet’s too Big" to the Andrews Sisters’ mega-hit, "Bei Mir Bist du Schoen" ("With me, you're beautiful"). Devout hedonists, the savvy Sardines play as if their trove of golden oldies had just been freshly minted as they strut through ancient songs, making them as saucy and relevant today and as much fun to party with as they must have been decades ago for your grandparents or great-grandparents.
The Hot Sardines -- which routinely pack in crowds like, well, sardines -- go to college to demonstrate their fun-loving, revisionist theories on Saturday, September 26, at 8:00 pm at UMass Fine Arts Center Concert Hall at 151 Presidents Drive in Amherst.
Don’t look for any museum or mausoleum-like reverence for even the most venerable of songs as the celebratory, campy, wittily snarky Sardines roar and rumble their irrepressibly irreverent, hilarious way through the antique hits they resurrect from the 1920s, '30s and '40s.
It’s all done with blustery brass, bravura and bravado, along with showbiz pizzazz generated by a sultry, Paris-born singer who’s bilingually naughty and nice in both French and English; a foot-stomping stride pianist whose flashy, two-handed pyrotechnics rock the house; and a dynamo drummer who unleashes the Thor-like thunder of Gene Krupa in a band that mixes cartoon craziness with unsinkable musical skills that never flounder.
Flamboyant and crackling with high-energy, the Sardines' show comes complete -- in the once-hallowed tradition of the Big Band era -- with a tap dancer. Having a hoofer aboard is yet another well-calculated Sardine synthesis of the past with the present, the zany combo’s way of infusing new fizz and pop into ancient, fizzling pop.
As time travelers, the Sardines love to explore robust remembrances of things past as they soar everywhere from classic New Orleans to prewar Paris when the City of Light was a movable feast, to New York City as a magical Gotham. Swinging and swaying, they embrace the Jazz Age from Gatsby to Gershwin, and salute World War II tunes as they boldly go in one era and out the other.
Miraculously, even the Sardines’ original songs evoke the past while making it all sound like the present, an existential moment when the old and the new jitterbug together in a madly partying pas de deux.
Helping you to get into the spirit of things, there will be a preconcert “Speakeasy” party in the lobby with a cash bar starting at 6:30 pm. Dress to impress and capture the spirit of the Jazz Age and you might win a prize. General admission reserved seats, $40.00. Information: (413) 545-2511.
Pittsfield’s Jazz Bash
Celebrated trumpeter Randy Brecker sits in with The Greg Hopkins Jazz Orchestra and virtuoso guitarist Frank Vignola grooves in dueling duets with fellow guitar gymnast Vinny Raniolo in two highlights of the eleventh annual Pittsfield CityJazz Festival, which runs from October 9 through October 18.
The non-profit festival steps off on Columbus Day weekend with its annual Jazz About Town, a “jazz crawl,” as it is called, featuring local musicians playing in restaurants and lounges throughout Pittsfield’s Upstreet Cultural District. These closely scattered startup events, with their stress on showcasing local talent in hometown clubs and pubs, conclude on October 11 with a Sunday jazz brunch. Dates, times, locations, performers, etc. to be posted at berkshiresjazz.org.
The festival’s mid-week feature is another major perennial event, the Jazz Prodigy concert. This season’s prodigy is 12-year-old pianist Esteban Castro, recommended as “a new discovery” by Jazz House Kids, a nationally noted program and proving ground for young talent. Castro displays his wunderkind chops at an admission-free concert on October 14 at 7:00 pm at the Berkshire Athenaeum.
The prodigy concert, which offers a preview of the future of jazz, will be followed by the headliners’ weekend, which highlights name performers, including Vignola, who’s back for a festival encore, and Brecker appearing as a special guest with the Hopkins Orchestra.
Vignola, a versatile guitarist who has played with a diverse array of artists ranging from Madonna and Ringo Star to Wynton Marsalis and Les Paul, matches wits and digital dexterity with his dueling guitar partner, Raniolo, on October 16 at 7:00 pm at Baba Louie’s Backroom. Tickets are $25.00 in advance, $30.00 on the day of the event; dinner available separately.
Vignola, who has conducted master classes around the world, will conduct a private clinic for students at Reid Middle School and a public master class at Wood Brothers Music on October 17 at 11:00 am, with no admission charge.
A multi Grammy winner, Brecker not only made a series of groundbreaking, genre-bending albums with his late brother, the great saxophonist Michael Brecker, but also played with Blood, Sweat and Tears and the Horace Silver Quintet. He’s been the trumpeter/flugelhornist of choice for artists ranging from James Taylor and Frank Sinatra to Steely Dan and Frank Zappa. He’ll be the guest soloist with the Hopkins Orchestra on October 17 at 8:00 pm at The Colonial Theatre. Tickets: $35.00 and $20.00.
In addition to Brecker and the orchestra led by Greg Hopkins, a conductor, performer and composer/arranger, two student groups will also perform that evening, the Herberg Middle School Jazz Ensemble and the Rock On Music Camp Ensemble.
Please submit press releases on upcoming jazz events at least two weeks before the publication date to omac28@gmail.com. Comments left below are also most welcome.
