Winter Jazzfest

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    Winter Jazzfest Has Company: Unity Jazz Festival

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    The decision to place another festival right on top of Jazzfest highlighted how much has been flipped upside-down in jazz over the past 20 years.Back in 2005 — when the first NYC Winter Jazzfest was held at the Knitting Factory in Lower Manhattan, and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s multimillion-dollar facilities had recently opened on the Upper West Side — it was clear which represented the establishment, and which was proposing an alternative. Today, it’s not such an easy distinction.Steered by its artistic director, the Pulitzer Prize-winning trumpeter and retro jazz philosopher Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center was cultivating an older and affluent audience, adjacent to the opera-going crowd. Marsalis’s bookings proudly held the line for what he considered jazz’s defining virtues. Two decades later, those things are still true.Winter Jazzfest was geared toward disruption. The mid-2000s were lean years for the music: Online file sharing hit jazz musicians especially hard, and the fallout from the Sept. 11 attacks left many live-music venues closed throughout New York City.Brice Rosenbloom, Winter Jazzfest’s founder, positioned it as both an infusion of crucial life support and a challenge to some of jazz’s passively dominant trends. The festival’s biggest target, perhaps, was the idea that you could draw any stark dividing lines through music: Pop-friendly, fusion-driven, acoustic and tradition-revering improvisers coexisted on the festival’s bill, which in that first year unfolded across three stages on a single night at the Knit.New York jazz lost its flagship summertime festival in 2009, leaving Winter Jazzfest as the biggest game in town; since then it has grown into more than a week of concerts and satellite events. Every year, it offers a full buffet of the current flavors in jazz at a mix of theaters, rock halls and small rooms.The 20th annual Winter Jazzfest marathons took place over the weekend, in Lower Manhattan on Friday night and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Saturday. From the sound of things, no matter how dark things may look in the wider world, the state of improvised music appears strong.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      The Saxophone Master Shabaka Hutchings Is on a New Journey: Flutes

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      The British musician is an artist in residence at Winter Jazzfest in New York this week, playing an instrument group that he first picked up in 2019.As Shabaka Hutchings led a concert tribute to Pharoah Sanders in early December, he returned to a familiar equation: funneling gallons of air through his tenor saxophone, transforming it into a corrosive stream of sound.Hutchings has been an essential figure on a British jazz scene that has experienced an uptick in popularity over the past decade because of its erasure of genre boundaries and its embrace of the art form’s foundational dance music sensibilities. His distinctive tenor has long been the through line of his diverse, widely acclaimed projects, connecting the electronic skronk of the Comet Is Coming to the fire of Sons of Kemet, and lately to the legacy of fellow hard-blowing saxophonists like Sanders.But by the time we met earlier this month, Hutchings, 39, had put down the saxophone, if not for good then certainly for the foreseeable. A handful of gigs across London last month — the Sanders tribute, an extended take on John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and a final flourish as a guest with the pianist Alexander Hawkins’s trio — were the final chances to hear Hutchings performing on an instrument that has dominated his musical life for the first part of his professional career. When he appears at New York’s Winter Jazzfest as an artist in residence this week, for the most part he will be playing flutes, an instrument group that he first picked up in 2019.“The bands that I was doing those gigs with became successful enough for them to dominate all the space of my work,” Hutchings said, speaking quietly and methodically, in a way that suggested recounting recent life events to others may be another extension of his artistic practice. “People say, because you’re doing lots of work on the saxophone, you are a saxophone player. I’m not really a saxophone player.” He felt that the only chance to be proficient elsewhere was to make a bold change.“I think of him as a sort of a multi-instrumentalist,” said the pianist Alexander Hawkins, a longtime collaborator. “Rather than being a switch, I think this is just a move towards other modes of expression.” The decision, which Hutchings said “ultimately boils down to intuition,” still surprised even him, though. “I literally would never have imagined putting down the saxophone back in 2020,” he said.In 2020, Hutchings also likely didn’t anticipate a rising profile for the flute in jazz. But “New Blue Sun,” a surprise release from the onetime Outkast rapper André 3000 last November that featured him playing different types of flute, gave the instrument a boost. (A new album from Hutchings is due this spring.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More