With the departure of artistic director Don Lucoff, PDX Jazz and the PDX Jazz Festival received a long overdue shake up. During his decade-long tenure, the festival had settled into a comfortable groove of booking plenty of legacy acts alongside some young guns that rarely ruffled anyone’s feathers—many of whom, it should be said, were clients of Lucoff’s marketing business DL Media. An unavoidable conflict of interest, perhaps, but it felt like a conflict all the same.
His replacement, Nicholas Salas-Harris, couldn’t have been a better choice. He had already invested a lot into the Portland music community with his work at Soul’d Out Productions and helping open the Jack London Revue. And from the earliest announcement of the lineup for this year’s PDX Jazz Festival, his fingerprints were visible.
The old guard still gets their say, with upcoming appearances by Archie Shepp, Branford Marsalis, and Stanley Clarke. But the emphasis this year is on those artists that expand the scope of jazz into territory previously held by producers of hip-hop and electronic music. For example, the two artists who kicked off the festival last night at the Star Theater: Mark de Clive-Lowe and Jaimie Branch.
Opinions about the opening night concert swung hard from rhapsodic to dumbfounded. Considering the standing ovation Branch and her band of Chicago heavies got from the folks seated near the stage, I’m guessing the room leaned toward the former. But, as any marketing expert will tell you, the negative comments stick the strongest, like a colleague who defied anyone to explain to them what was so special about the set.
I’ll do my best.
Branch’s set was a complete refutation of the standard head-solo-solo-solo-head style that is common practice among traditional jazz ensembles. The music, much of it taken from the trumpeter’s 2019 album FLY Or DIE II, flowed from spacious Sun Ra-style ambience anchored by drummer Chad Taylor’s mbira melodies to a Latin groove elegy to families separated at the US/Mexico border, and grinding blues that centered on band and audience singing, “A love song/ For assholes and clowns.”
The four members of the ensemble worked on completely different but entirely complementary frequencies. Branch played as if challenging herself to see how little she could play while still having the same emotional effect of spilling out a virtuosic run of notes. The rest of the band—Taylor, bassist Jason Ajemian, and cellist Lester St. Louis—swapped roles at times: the string players thumping on their instruments percussively; the drummer using a cello bow on a cymbal for a guitar feedback-like tone. The rough edges felt like passion straining against the ropes.
As good as Mark de Clive-Lowe’s closing performance was, it lacked Branch’s rawness and momentum, both ingredients that he uses in abundance at more low-key shows. And it all came down to his choice of material. The keyboardist and his band, which included former Portlander Hailey Niswanger on flute and saxophone, played selections from his Heritage albums, a series that explored de Clive-Lowe’s Japanese ancestry through modern, beat-heavy arrangements of traditional melodies and songs inspired by the island nation’s folk tales.
Between every song, de Clive-Lowe would go into detail about the inspiration behind each one, even telling a rather brutal legend that he learned from his mom. A fine idea in theory, but it left me feeling restless, itching for him to get playing. Once he and the band settled into a liquid groove, it felt like leaving solid ground for a luxurious float on the water or getting pushed skyward by the wind. But soon enough, we were yanked back to earth.