DC Jazz Festival Perseveres Through Sixth Year

DC Jazz Festival
Washington, D.C.
June 1-13, 2010

The biggest success of the sixth annual Washington, D.C. jazz festival may simply have been pulling it off. Faced with difficult economic times and a rebranding from the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival to the DC Jazz Festival, which according to several sources resulted from a dispute over rights to the festival's name, the event could easily have sputtered out of existence. Instead, festival founder and dedicated impresario Charles Fishman persevered to present another year of satisfying performances spread out across the city's major venues and smaller clubs alike, continuing his mission to reclaim DC's jazz heritage and foster a newly resurgent jazz community in the nation's capital, despite the country's economic doldrums.

Though lacking one of the festival's major attractions in prior years, an all-day free concert on the National Mall, the nearly two weeks of festival events delivered a healthy mix of local talent, new voices, and festival stalwarts. And, as in previous years, organizers provided a diverse menu of genres and venues, including matinee events, educational programs, family-oriented programming, and late night explorations of DC's growing club scene. Premier events included an all-star tribute honoring NEA jazz master James Moody at the historic Lincoln Theater; the debut of the outdoor Carter Baron as a festival venue, featuring Poncho Sanchez and renowned Columbian harpist Edmar Castenada; a multi-concert extravaganza at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium, showcasing Claudio Roditi, Eddie Palmieri, Roberta Flack, and the Roy Hargrove Big Band; a Kennedy Center performance by Paquito D'Rivera of a commissioned piece "The Jelly Roll Morton Latin Tinge"; as well as numerous outings at local clubs, restaurants, and bars throughout the city, including Bohemian Caverns, which proved repeatedly why it is rapidly becoming the heart of Washington's revived jazz scene.

In fact, flourishing under the welcoming sense of community that owner-operator Omrao Brown cultivates, the Caverns seemed to play a central role in the festival as a whole. The historic club acted as impromptu rehearsal space, de facto host for after hours jam sessions, and venue for some of the most compelling festival events, including a cutting edge performance by the Marc Cary Focus Trio. A Washington native, pianist and composer Cary was joined by Taurus Mateen on bass and Sameer Gupta on drums and tabla. From opening note, the trio's devilish fusion of jazz, go-go rhythms, and electronica infused the Cavern's intimate quarters with pulsing waves of high energy music. Utilizing piano, keyboards, and laptop, Cary delivered multi-dimensional solo after solo, tune after tune. But perhaps most impressive, the Marc Cary trio has developed into an integrated unit that breaks with almost any traditional descriptor one might attempt to apply. More structured than the classic jazz "group improvisation" trio, yet able to fluidly respond to each other's slightest shift, the trio manifested a wholly unique, fully realized musical world marked by a surging blend of rhythms and dense layers of improvisation. Particularly stirring were the tunes "Behoop" and "Taiwa," on which Gupta switched to tablas to create a sensuous, ceaselessly shifting foundation upon which Cary and Mateen built far-ranging explorations. A peak of the festival by any measure, the Cary Trio exemplified the best aspects of the DC Jazz Festival—great music performed in an intimate setting to a highly appreciative crowd.