Before diving into the diverse sounds that will fill the streets of Lansing’s Old Town at this week’s JazzFest Michigan, let’s ask a crucial question: What is jazz, anyway?
Ha! Just kidding. We’re not going to snack on those rusty nails. Like a baby elephant with a crayon in its trunk bouncing over the potholes of Kalamazoo Street in a flatbed truck, JazzFest isn’t overly focused on coloring inside the lines.
For its 30th anniversary, JazzFest Michigan (formerly Lansing JazzFest) has expanded to five days, from tonight’s (July 31) kickoff gig at UrbanBeat to a four-hour gospel extravaganza on Sunday (Aug. 4). That leaves plenty of room for music that’s straight-up jazz, jazz adjacent, sorta-kinda jazz and “let’s just throw this in for fun.”
Michigan State University saxophone Professor Walter Blanding leads the core jazz contingent with a benefit concert Thursday evening (Aug. 1) to raise funds for musician scholarships and an additional performance at 8:30 p.m. Saturday (Aug. 3) on the MessageMakers stage. (For more about Blanding’s remarkable life journey in music, check out his interview with City Pulse, posted June 19.) To plant the jazz flag deeper, Detroit’s machine-tooled Planet D Nonet brings a bursting bag of Duke Ellington tunes at 9:30 p.m. Saturday on the MICA stage.
This year’s festival also showcases the latest, jazziest phase of blues and soul singer Freddie Cunningham’s musical journey, F&J Inc., at 6:30 p.m. Friday (Aug. 2) on the MICA stage.
Most JazzFest bands have already appeared at UrbanBeat, the live music venue on Turner Street that will also serve as the festival’s epicenter. These artists reflect UrbanBeat’s eclectic spirit, orbiting the jazz-o-sphere at varying altitudes and attitudes. There’s the Battle Creek jazz-fusion band Minor Element (7:45 p.m. Friday, MessageMakers stage), soulful neo-crooner Bashiri Asad (10:30 p.m. Friday at UrbanBeat, followed by an afterglow performance and jam session), award-winning jazz vocalist Olivia Van Goor with bassist Reuben Stump (3 p.m. Saturday, MessageMakers stage) and the hypnotic jazz-rock forays of the young Chicago band Marbin (6:30 p.m. Saturday, MICA stage).
In between, there’s music for every energy level, from the sizzling Latin licks of Detroit’s award-winning Tumbao Bravo (9 p.m. Friday on the MICA stage) to the cool, atmospheric and borderline scary whispers of singer-trumpeter Matt von Roderick (5 p.m. Saturday on the MessageMakers stage).
Nearly every jazz artist either started out singing in a choir or gravitated to gospel music at some point in their lives. So, it’s only fitting that come Sunday, Turner Street will resound with a full slate of gospel artists, hosted by Pastor Anthony Taylor, head of Lansing’s Southside Records label.
But is it jazz? There is only one logical answer: “hallelujah!” By Sunday afternoon, nobody will care how jazzy gospel, rock, folk, hip-hop and R&B can be. They’ll be too busy vibrating to the last “amen” as it rolls through their souls and down the street into history.
The amber burn of Freddie Cunningham’s matchless voice — aching with emotion, burnished with wisdom and aged to perfection — is welcome at any music festival, whatever the name.
These days, Cunningham, the longtime frontman of soul-blues juggernaut Root Doctor, finds himself in jazz mode. That makes JazzFest the perfect place to lay down his latest musical bag.
“This is going to be a little different,” Cunningham said.
He wasn’t sure how his musical life would play out after 2021, when Root Doctor held a farewell tour after 32 years of roof-rattling soul and blues.
Several months ago, veteran drummer Jeff Shoup invited Cunningham to perform at his weekly showcase of local and national jazz artists, Jazz Tuesdays at Moriarty’s Pub.
Singing jazz felt like a natural progression.
“A long time ago, when everybody wanted to do rock ‘n’ roll, soul and stuff, I wanted to do blues,” Cunningham said. “I got to do it, and I enjoyed it. When Jeff invited me to Jazz Tuesdays, things kind of expanded.”
Shoup and Hammond organist Jim Alfredson, a frequent partner at the Mort’s gigs, were more than happy to cruise with Cunningham into jazzier waters. Cunningham and Alfredson had already worked together in Root Doctor for 10 years.
“We put together some tunes, and Jimmy’s so easy to work with,” Cunningham said. “They’re such professionals; they made it easy.”
At Mort’s, a new group coalesced around Cunningham’s vocal artistry, F&J Inc., featuring Shoup, East Lansing saxophonist Sam Corey and Luke Sittard, a bebop-loving guitarist who teaches at MSU’s Community Music School in Detroit. All three will return to play with Cunningham at JazzFest. Alfredson’s B-3 chair will be filled by another Mort’s regular, organist Clif Metcalf.
“It’s more of a jazz flavor, where Root Doctor was rhythm & blues and soul,” Cunningham said. “The feel, the emotion, is pretty much the same, though, and I’m big into that. I enjoy it, and the people seem to enjoy it.”
If anything, the timeless F&J Inc. songbook lets Cunningham slow things down, shape each note more lovingly and dive more deeply into the well of emotion.
At Mort’s, Cunningham plumbed new worlds of expression in standards like “Almost Like Being in Love,” “My One and Only Love,” “Since I Fell for You,” “Misty” and “Unforgettable.”
One of his favorites is Victor Young’s “When I Fall in Love,” immortalized in a 1956 recording by Nat King Cole.
“There’s so much emotion, I can hardly get through it,” he said. “It’s that deep for me.”
Cunningham also had fun tripping lightly through up-tempo standards like Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”
Added to the mix are a few 1960s hits that fit the mellow vibe, like “Sunny” and “The Shadow of Your Smile.”
It’s not that Cunningham’s grinding and shouting days are over. Anyone who caught him at a city-sponsored concert at Lansing’s Davis Park last month, dancing and rocking through the Temptations’ “Shakey Ground” with funk band Mixed Flavors, can attest to that.
“When I get a chance, I like to try and put my best foot forward,” he said.
He still sings in a Root Doctor-style bag with a blues and funk trio, the Jack Pine Savages, at a small venue in Brooklyn, southeast of Jackson.
But his primary focus for now is on the F&J Inc. repertoire, a revered cache of classics that have inspired and challenged the world’s greatest singers for decades.
“With soul and R&B, you have more of a chance to just let it out, get into it,” he said. “Now I have to work pretty diligently on my control. It’s not any less fun for me, but it’s a little more conscious. You can get your point across just as strongly.”
After giving his all to singing blues and R&B for decades, he’s finding that he has another “all” to give.
“I’m not that tired at the end of the night as far as exertion, but it still taxes me, and that’s enjoyable to me,” he said. “It gives me something to shoot for, something to learn. It’s a lifelong process. You never will know it all.”
When Root Doctor broke up, Cunningham had visions of traveling and seeing the world. With several performances in July alone, his schedule doesn’t look much like a retirement.
“You’re not the first person who’s told me that,” he said.
Life in Lansing with his wife, manager and muse, Marge Mooney, is treating him well. There’s a reason he chokes up when singing the verse, “When I fall in love, it will be forever.”
As far as travel goes, a day trip to visit his daughter in Detroit or his son in Chicago is enough excitement.
“I don’t do much of that,” he said. “Three or four days away from home, and I’m ready to come back. Plus, we have a dog and three cats.”
Veteran Detroit drummer and bandleader RJ Spangler knows what he calls “a special situation” when he sees one, and he’s hip-deep in one right now.
Spangler’s nine-cylinder musical engine from Detroit, the Planet D Nonet, roars into JazzFest riding high over the critical and commercial success of its 2023 tribute to Duke Ellington, “Blues to Be There.”
Ellington tribute albums aren’t exactly in short supply, but for Spangler and his men, the project came at just the right time.
The nonet revels in Ellington’s lush harmonic palette of purple, ebony, vermilion and wavelengths yet unnamed. The group even put its own unique stamp on “Caravan,” a tune that has been covered hundreds of times, swirling and drifting through its polyrhythms in an opium-den ecstasy.
It’s a natural pairing. The Planet D Nonet is a musical time machine, and so was Ellington. In its long history, the nonet has zig-zagged from the avant-garde vibes of Sun Ra and his Arkestra to the old-time music of saxophonist and clarinetist Budd Johnson, a largely forgotten figure who bridged big-band jazz, bebop and early R&B.
“I’ve done all these tributes to different artists, and everything comes in its own time,” Spangler said. “In my evolution as an artist and a bandleader, it was time for this.”
Ellington, who lived from 1899 to 1974, took music from the horse-and-buggy era into the Space Age, always alert to the newest developments.
“Every era he was alive, he was making significant music that was cutting edge,” Spangler said. “What an artist.”
Ellington’s music gives the nonet a chance to show all the chops they have, from Model T to moonshot. No wonder “Blues to Be There” stayed at No. 1 on the national Roots Music Report big-band chart for 12 weeks and made many critics’ year-end top 10 lists.
After “Blues to Be There” was in the can, Spangler had plenty of charts left, and the band was still in the mood for Ellington. The result is a brand-new follow-up, “Echoes of Harlem,” that’s already getting national airplay.
The album swings with gusto from Ellington’s Cotton Club days (“Rocks in My Bed”) to his most modern stylings (“La Plus Belle Africaine”).
For the album, Spangler dipped into a sweet spot where Michigan history and Ellingtoniana improbably, but gloriously, came together.
In 1958, Ellington visited Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for location filming with the cast and crew of the classic 1959 film “Anatomy of a Murder.”
“Echoes of Harlem” includes several tunes from Ellington’s soundtrack for the film, including the saucy swinger “Flirtibird,” inspired by actress Lee Remick’s sexy role. Last summer, Spangler took the nonet to the Upper Peninsula and performed the tunes at the tiny Mount Shasta Restaurant, where Ellington and “Anatomy” star Jimmy Stewart play a four-hand piano boogie in the film. The nonet played to a packed house on the veranda of the Thunder Bay Inn, another location in the film.
“It was great — quite an undertaking,” Spangler said.
The nonet will play the “Anatomy” tunes and much more in an all-Ellington program at JazzFest. Anchoring the band will be James O’Donnell, lead trumpeter and nonet co-founder; trombonist John “T-Bone” Paxton; and, of course, Spangler.
Nearly 50 years ago, Spangler, Paxton and O’Donnell formed a band called the Sun Messengers, playing everything from Fela Kuti burners to Louis Jordan jump blues. There have been detours along the way, but they’re still together.
“I’ve been playing with those guys for 46 years,” Spangler said. “They’re my lifelong brothers in music.”
How much do these guys love playing Ellington? Another longtime nonet member, pianist Mike Zaporski, is cutting short a vacation in Ludington to drive to the Lansing gig.
The Sun Messengers enjoyed some heady times in the 1970s, working with activist-poet-musician John Sinclair and jamming with Sun Ra trumpeter Michael Ray.
“We were record store guys, listening to a voracious amount of music, and we’ve always felt that way,” Spangler said. He savors the memory of smoking weed and listening to P-Funk with fire-breathing Sun Ra saxophonist Marshall Allen after a wild Sun Ra concert in Ann Arbor. (Allen got the royal treatment in a June 24 New Yorker profile marking his 100th birthday.)
Later, when Ray moved to New Orleans, he invited Spangler to play on a record with Phish lead guitarist Trey Anastasio.
But after a while, the Messengers’ music morphed from Sun Ra’s “We Travel the Space Ways” to “Wedding Bells are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.”
“The guys wanted to play weddings and make as much money as they could because they were always getting married and staying home, but I wanted to see the world and play music,” Spangler said.
Spangler’s wanderlust inspired him to become musical director and drummer for iconic blues guitarist Johnnie Bassett.
“We went to Europe a bunch of times, went coast to coast in Canada and the U.S. and made a lot of great records,” Spangler said.
Members of the Bassett band went on to play with Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger and other music legends.
After the years with Bassett, Spangler reconnected with Paxton, O’Donnell and other “guys from the old days” in 2007 and lifted the curtain on his third act, Planet D Nonet.
The band went from one triumph to the next, recording 18 albums and gaining more critical and audience acclaim than any of them had ever enjoyed.
For Spangler, the back-to-back Ellington tributes have been the most successful — and possibly the most rewarding — of all.
“We’re trying to keep it respectful, but these musicians are at the top of their game,” Spangler said. “They’re interested in making it come alive every time they play.”
Indianapolis singer and composer Bashiri Asad knows how to sneak up on you and get inside your head.
With a sweet tenor voice, lubricious and lovely grooves and a wide-eyed air of wonder, he clears a sweet space for a reverie and brings the listener along.
His latest album is called “The Everyday SoulSinger,” and he embraces the title.
“When you leave your world — your corporate world, whatever it is that you do — and you’re looking to be transported to another place, you take your boyfriend or girlfriend, your spouse, and go to a jazz club, a lounge,” he said. “I’m the soul singer. I’m there to do my part. It’s therapeutic for me, too.”
He’s adept at gently drawing audiences deep into a mood — happy, sad or bittersweet. “Bare” finds him “staring at the great abyss/of self-inflicted loneliness.” Another original tune, “Fallin’,” is a quiet declaration of love. “Baby, I’m digging on you,” he muses to the beat of acoustic guitar strums and finger snaps, as if coming to the realization while walking down an empty street.
He pivots deftly to the clap-your-hands, rubber-ball bounce of Luther Vandross’ 1981 R&B hit “Never Too Much” and Bobby Caldwell’s 1979 megahit “What You Won’t Do for Love.”
Not only does he give his all, without the slightest hint of irony or condescension, to the Carpenters’ 1971 soft-rock hit “Superstar,” but he has the confidence to slow it further down. (To be fair, Vandross, one of his musical heroes, also made the song his own.)
Several years ago, a young woman told Asad she spent her last $10 to hear him sing.
“She needed a reminder that there were beautiful things left in the world,” Asad said. “You can’t take it too personally because you have your own things that you’re dealing with. But it’s a reminder that we’re all connected.”
At 46, Asad is grateful for the opportunity to do what he loves.
“As you get older, you start to appreciate things that have always been under your nose,” he said. “You learn to take it all in. It’s just time being the ultimate truth teller.”
Asad grew up singing in the choirs at Little Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in his hometown of Indianapolis. Although he sang in various groups throughout middle and high school and joined the chorus at Central State University in Ohio, it was never in his mind to sing for a living.
“I always enjoyed doing it, singing those three-, four- and five-part harmonies, but I was always like the third guy in the group,” he said.
He loved singers who shamelessly put their hearts (and uvulas) on their sleeves, like Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Donny Hathaway and Jeffrey Osborne.
“Luther Vandross was THE guy,” he said. He realized that many of these iconic singers, including Stevie Wonder, came from the Midwest, and he began to study their styles.
“I got into gospel singers like Daryl Coley later, in college,” Asad said. “But I’m a soul head through and through.”
Many of Asad’s compositions celebrate the power of music to shake off the dust of the daily routine. He’s so convincing at it because he discovered that power in his own life.
After college, his life was grounded in a happy marriage, a big family (he has five children) and a steady job with the city, but after a few years, he missed making music.
“I realized that if I didn’t use it, I would lose it,” he said. With his wife’s encouragement, he pursued a singing career, and it’s still going strong.
Asad’s soaring vocals are best set against the twinkling, bell-like star field of an electric keyboard, whether it’s a Rhodes, Wurlitzer or clavinet.
“It’s all about the keyboards,” Asad said. “I’m a big Rhodes fan and a Wurly fan. I love a good clav. Your keyboard must have the attitude and feel for those sounds. Stevie Wonder was the absolute master of this.”
Keyboard man Fred Dixie Jr. will caress the keys at JazzFest, alongside Taj St. Helene on bass, Graham Helste on guitar and Jordhan Perkins on drums. (Asad calls his band The Lady.)
“When everything comes together on stage — the arrangement comes together, the keyboard and the bass are together, the drummer’s not doing too much and not doing too little, the guitar player is hanging inside the crevice — you can’t beat it,” Asad said.
For him, music is a way to reconnect with the juice of life, and he loves to share that connection with the audience.
“When it comes to matters of love, we have to make sure we nourish it, water it, give it light,” he said. “These are the things that got us here in the first place. It’s a lifelong exercise.”
But how does he shake the dust off, on demand, night after night?
“It’s the old adage,” he said. “If it doesn’t feel like work, it’s what you’re supposed to be doing.”
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