Reviews
Published 2/19/04
‘The American Songbook':Playing Jazz on a Sunday Afternoon
By Tom Hill
Valley News Staff Writer
One could dwell on the contrast between the cradle of the art form in question — the crowded, smoky cellars of America's cities, where jazz was born — and the venue of this afternoon: a spacious, well-appointed gathering place on a New Hampshire mountainside.
But let's just listen to the music. There's nothing provincial about that; singer Shawnn Monteiro and the five sidemen behind her in the Draper Room of the Center at Eastman in Grantham know what they're doing. Monteiro’s pedigree is impeccable; her father, Jimmy Woode, played with Duke Ellington for many years, and she has worked with the likes of Clark Terry, Jimmy Cobb, Stan Kenton and the late Ray Brown. An artist who tours internationally, she drove up from her Rhode Island home for the gig.
And, while the setting may have a cabaret ambience — the audience of about 150 people sits around some 20 large, round tables covered with white linen tablecloths, and the sunlight flashing through the western bank of the tall, wide windows that surround the room transforms the scattered wine glasses into prism lanterns -- these people are here to listen. A mostly well-heeled bunch, ranging from about 50 to 70 years in age, they face Monteiro attentively and applaud heartily after each instrumental solo.
Dressed in stiletto heels, a black pantsuit and a light, loose-fitting shawl decorated with vertical rows of sequins, Monteiro sings Old Devil Moon as sax man Richard Gardzina, John Hunter on string bass, trumpeter Jeff Hoyt, drummer Tim Gilmore and pianist Bill Wightman back her up.
This is Jazz on a Sunday Afternoon: an institution, if a somewhat peripatetic one, in the Upper Valley. It's a labor of love by Wightman — that's him playing piano, in a trim beard, a gray sport coat and snakeskin boots — who for 12 years has summoned top-flight jazz musicians to celebrate their skills in the North Country.
Wightman started the winter concert series, known to loyalists simply as JOSA, 12 years ago at the Lake Sunapee Country Club. When he became director of the Newport Opera House six years later, that institution became the venue until his recent resignation from that post.
“So I was looking for a spot, and this seemed to be a nice venue,” Wightman says, during a break between roughly two-hour sets. “And it's turning out to be exactly that: a great venue for it. For the first time in kind of a remote area, I think we're doing pretty good.”
Listening to almost any jazz soloist, you soon understand the respect they have for their material, the people who wrote and performed it when it was new, and those with whom they are playing at the moment. Almost every time one of her accompanists completes a solo — and the many extended solos are an integral part of the show — Monteiro names the soloist, and the audience applauds.
Monteiro also precedes nearly every song with a brief note of historical context, introducing Cole Porter's I Concentrate on You by noting his role in creating what is known as the “American Songbook”: compositions by Porter, the Gershwin brothers, Duke Ellington and others that are likely to be performed as long as there are performers.
The number is structured in classic fashion: Monteiro opening with a vocal, followed by a generous swap of instrumental solos all around. After each solo, the audience claps heartily — as does Monteiro.
The history lesson continues.
“There was a young actress in Hollywood they were doing a movie with,” Monteiro says, introducing her next song. “They were writing the movie around her and her persona, and they wrote this song for her. Her name was Mae West.” A murmur of surprised amusement passes through the crowd.
“And in this movie, the trio that played the song was the Duke Ellington Trio — a very young Edward Ellington.” She smiles. “You won't believe they wrote this song for Mae West.”
What follows, after a moody, shuffling intro by the band, is a classic torch song: My Old Flame. It's a bluesy, slow-dance number that Monteiro sings respectfully, with just a flicker or two of mischief.
“My old flame; can't even remember his name ... ” Just once, and only for a few seconds, she gives a dead-on impression of the saucy siren for whom the song was written: “My new loves — listen to the words — they all seem so tame,” she sings, rolling one shoulder seductively and passing a narrow-eyed glance at her listeners, who chuckle appreciatively. “I'll never be the same till I discover what became of ... my ... old ... flame ... ”
The audience applauds as Gardzina begins a moody, understated solo. This is a listening crowd; during a four-hour show, no one's attention wanders.
While sharing the audience's attention generously with the band, Monteiro is always quietly but firmly in charge — setting the tempo by snapping her fingers, gesturing toward Wightman when it's his turn for a piano solo, nodding almost imperceptibly toward Hoyt when his turn comes, extending a hand to one side and lowering it to slow down the tempo. As absorbed as they are in what they're doing, the musicians are always mindful of where Monteiro wants them to go: A slight wave of one hand silences everyone but flicker of one of her hands to silence all but Hunter, who plays all by himself for nearly a minute his left hand all up and down the neck, sometimes playing two and even three strings at once.
It's one of the paradoxes of jazz: It's all about improvisation, but the form would fall apart in an instant if the participants were not also master collaborators. It may look largely spontaneous, but jazz requires an almost supernatural unity. Each man is aware of what everyone else is doing — who was just out front, who's stepping back, who’s about to step forward. One moment of reckless self-absorption, and the chemistry collapses.
Prior to one tune, Monteiro tells the audience she's “gonna change the program” to feature a well-known local sideman, drummer Tim Gilmore. She discovered the tune she's about to sing, she explains, while going through her mother's albums after her recent death.
“She had more records than God,” Monteiro says, and the collection included a Rosemary Clooney album on which she discovered the tune in question.
The song — Alone at Last, by Neil Sedaka — is a light brew of spare, tasteful lyrics and sophisticated chord progressions to a bossa-nova beat. It offers Gilmore a chance to display his technique — not flashy (flashy is rarely the point in jazz), but adroit and rooted in impeccable timing. He wraps up with a bouquet of sprightly solo vamps, and the audience applauds heartily.
Then, celebrating the contrast, Monteiro springs into a lively take on an Ellington classic: Take the A Train. By now, the band is floating: weightless, casting no musical shadows as they take their solo turns between the verses:
“I see the train a-comin'!
All aboard that A Train,
It's the only way you're gonna find yourself in Harlem!
The tune dissolves into one of those long, rambling codas in which all the players seem to be doing their own thing — a melange of free-range doodles, chortles, rim-shots and cadenzas — only to converge on the same tight, final beat like a posse of smart bombs.
***
Wightman grew up outside New York City, and has been musical all his life. Between sets, he explains that his mother sang music professionally, “and she had all this old sheet music around: W.C. Handy, jazz. So I started playing it, because I could read, and I was kind of jazzed up a little bit.”
His family moved to New Hampshire when he was in high school, but musically, “there was really not much going on.” After high school, he says, “I said, ‘I don't know enough.' ” He enrolled at Boston’s renowned Berklee College of Music; “then the world opened up.”
He knocked around the jazz scene in Massachusetts and Connecticut for several years, finally settling in New Hampshire during the early '90s and co-founding Jazz on a Sunday Afternoon with the late Rink Mann and “Lady” Eve. “These guys, I've been playing with for years,” Wightman says of his sidemen. “They’re from all over the state. I’m very fortunate to have connected with these guys, who are just top-notch.
He finds it hard to verbalize the reasons for his love of jazz. “It's the improvisation; it's the newness of it every time,” he says. “When you’re playing, you're dancing — you’re just flying; you’re riding the wave. And it’s wonderful when you get there.
“That's why you do it — and that's why you get exploited,” he adds. “People say, ‘He just loves to do it so much, he'll do it for nothing.’ ” Then, laughing again: “Unfortunately, you're right.”
He describes his professional status with knowing irony: “As they say in Hollywood, I'm in between. “ Actually, he's on the New Hampshire roster of artists in residence, and stays pretty busy. Earlier this month he was in residency in Barnstead, where he created a musical play with a cast of some 70 grade-school students.
Wightman notes that though a jazz show may look spontaneous, he and his cohorts are actually reading charts, which Monteiro brought with her. “We rarely have a rehearsal; today we had a little going-over of a couple of tunes, but it's usually pretty cold when we're looking at the stuff,” he says. “I’ll tell the audience, ‘This is a work in progress; we might stop a tune: Hey, hold it, hold it, start again.’ And they love it. We’re not trying to be polished — although if it comes out, we're happy.”
Considering the quality of the music, Wightman adds, it's quite a bargain at $12 a seat. “People are already saying, ‘This price is ridiculous; these are $60 seats,” he says with a laugh. “That's what this woman just told me: ‘Raise the price!' But I don’t want it inaccessible, either; I’ve got to consider whether it works.”
***
“It's a wonderful series,” Monteiro says between sets, nursing a glass of wine in the nearby Grill Room. “I have to tell you what a wonderful thing Bill Wightman does, because jazz is dying in America.”
Like jazz musicians in general, Monteiro has found a far more receptive audience in Europe and beyond (“I just did a concert in Dubai”) than in the land where jazz was born.
“I mean, seriously, there's no place to work here, so we go further and further away from America,” she says. “This is an American art form; this is our music, your music, my music. Cole Porter, Gershwin, Thelonius Monk — all those people grew up in America, and there's no place to play it. It’s very sad. “American culture is fickle, and they go with the flow,” she adds. “Now hip-hop is big. It's not only black kids. It’s every culture, suburbia, America — all those kids, white kids, their drawers are hanging down to their knees. ... All I hear is hip-hop and rap, and it fries my brain — I can’t stand it; I cannot stand it.”
Whereas in Europe, “They don't want to hear the hip-hop,” she says. “They want to hear Sarah Vaughan; they want to hear Billie Holiday. Maybe they appreciate the culture there more. It's not theirs, but they just appreciate that it's good music.”
The subject returns to Wightman.
“I know he takes a loss every year, but he does it every year because he loves the music,” she says. “So you have to appreciate his love of jazz for doing this, you know what I mean? It's a wonderful thing.”
Wightman first heard Monteiro singing on the radio in Boston, she says. “He called me, and I came up, and I did a concert series. And I thought so well of what he was doing, I said, ‘No matter how much the bread is, or whatever, just call me.' ” He's been calling ever since.
Monteiro praises the Draper Room audience as well. “These people, they definitely get it,” she says. “They came here because they already got it before we started playing, so it's a perfect audience. They come to sit and listen, and they appreciate what you do. They appreciate the drummer's riffs; they appreciate the horns; that’s what they come to hear, so this is like the joy for me to come up here.”
Back in the Draper Room, Monteiro dishes out the classics, one after another: The Shadow of Your Smile, I've Found a New Baby, A Foggy Day in London Town. As the evening winds down, her rapport with the audience has become almost comic.
“Does somebody have a big house we can play at tomorrow?” she asks after everyone has clapped along to her sprightly take on The Second Time round. “I don't want to go home.”
This Sunday's featured JOSA artist will be vocalist Dane Vannatter, followed by trumpeter Tiger Okoshi on March 7, Steve Marvin on March 21, and an “all-star jam” featuring Big Joe Burrell and Jenni Johnson on April 4, the last show of the season. To reserve a ticket, call (603) 763-8732. For last-minute seating availability, call (603) 863-2513.
"Twelve years after it began, Jazz on a Sunday Afternoon has become an institution in the Upper Valley"
Copyright © 2004 Wightsteeple Productions
