Red Sea Jazz Festival

AMERICAN TWOSOME of trumpeter Dave Douglas and pianist Uri Caine perform at the Red Sea Jazz Festival.. (photo credit:DIGI DECKEL)

As the program promised there were multifarious thrills and spills on offer at the Port of Eilat as the country’s biggest annual jazz bash got underway amid scorching weather. The fact that the artists managed to perform, under stage lighting, and with their charts often buffeted by the hot desert wind, is testament to their professionalism. And perform they did, to the delight of the audiences, large and otherwise.

One of the standouts was the late replacement American twosome of trumpeter Dave Douglas and pianist Uri Caine, who came in for a world music act. Fiftysomething Douglas and Caine are leading members of the global jazz fraternity and old sparring partners, and they played numbers from their Present Joys album which came out earlier this year. Both are powerful players, with sizable chops, and kept the audience riveted as they swung, trilled, riffed and stormed their way through an emotive repertoire based on the shape note discipline which was devised for performers of sacred music in the early nineteenth century.

While both Douglas and Caine are well capable of muscular renditions there were plenty of gentler passages too, played with gossamer delicacy. On one number in particular Douglas put out lines bordering on the ethereal, which became progressively finer until he achieved a soft whistling sound. Over the years the festival audiences have never been shy about getting in on the act and many of us quickly offered some sonorous whistling of our own to augment Douglas’s output.

The trumpeter appeared delighted, and began conducting our amateur efforts, to everyone’s joy. Caine continued to spin out multi-layered riffs and melodic lines, along with more unfettered attacks fused with dense chords, rippling honky-tonk colorings and thudding keyboard work. There was also plenty of tongue-in-cheek stuff in the mix too.

read more: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Culture/Festival-Review-Red-Sea-Jazz-Festival-372822