2023-05-01 10:24:18
Almost 300 souls went this Sunday, April 30, International Jazz Day, to the Algorta Muxikebarri to witness the traditional and annual concert in memory of the popularizer of jazz in the Basque Country Pío Lindegaard (Per Erik Lindegaard Gredsted-Larsen, Amorebieta, 1920 – Getxo, 1999), who in the presentation of the endearing event was reported to have spent 50 years on the radio, who contributed decisively to launching the Bilbaína Jazz Club and the Getxo Jazz Festival, and whose archive (records, books , magazines…) is kept at the Andrés Isasi Music School in Las Arenas.
To remember the importance of Pío, a diplomat who used to wear suits and ties, this year brought the tenor saxophonist Jean Toussaint (born in the Virgin Islands in 1960, raised in Saint Thomas and New York, and since 1987 a resident of London), who showed a rather detached attitude regarding the honorable task that had been entrusted to him, dressed in a British Herst Jazz Festival 2012 shirt (from its second edition, from September 14 to 16) and with a more reprehensible orange jumper that was too sloppy and hardly appropriate to participate in an act in memory of a great lover of jazz. When he started out as a professional, in the 80s, within Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Jean Toussaint would appear before the respectable in a suit.
In this way, in the clothing, the Antillean blew for 8 pieces in exactly 90 minutes, escorted by three musicians based in Barcelona: the Venezuelan Antonio Mazzei at the piano (he was the one who put the most art to the matter in his solos), the Badalonian David Xirgu on drums (with his elegant security and three brief and stupendous solos, the first of them the most applauded of the session), plus the Colombian double bassist Juan Pablo Balcázar (substitute for the long-awaited Argentine maestro Horacio Fumero, with which the leader made him numerous gestures to indicate where the pod was going).
Antonio Mazzei (piano), Jean Toussaint (sax), Juan Pablo Balcázar (double bass) and David Xirgu (drums) opening with ‘Samba do arrival’.
Oh. C.
The first two thirds of the concert were too predictable, with the four performers hanging from the music stands with the scores (also the leader!) and giving shape to a melodic wave, with the elevator in the background, with at least three of the pieces presented Signed by sisters from Toussaint (‘Naomi’, ‘Calima’…), with certain tropical touches (the inaugural ‘Samba do arrival’), a pleasant ballad a la Scott Hamilton but displaying less personality, and a general feeling of lack of risk and not wanting to break the fourth wall or corduroy.
The last third, with three versions, although equally orthodox, throbbed a little more, but with no intention of going off the deep end in Billie Holiday’s ‘God bless the child’ (recreated in rhythmic and skinny protofunk mode, that is, very divergent from the recordings of the lady), achieving the peak of Sunday with Art Blakey’s ‘Moanin’, when he said that his first band was the Jazz Messengers led by the legendary drummer (this song had a very classical piano introduction by Antonio Mazzei), and in the encore revising the standard ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ also with tropical patina and held with tweezers.
People came out thinking that it was just fine, although his friend Gerardo Cremer thought it was very good: «The four musicians have been very good. Your problem is that you see many concerts. And okay, they don’t break with their music, but neither does a Bach quartet break ». Now, and perhaps Toussaint’s problem, with so many scores by his sisters, is that he is forgetting what jazz is (or was): music not to be recreated from scores (like classical or cultured music), but to absorb and disturb the public, to admire him and make him feel on the verge of vertigo.
#Jean #Toussaint #shadow #Pío #Lindegaard