Eddie Palmieri had the audience dancing at Hamer Hall. Photo: Suraj Jayawickrama
June 13, 2016
Jessica Nicholas
In a recent interview, Wayne Shorter summed up his approach to performance with a rhetorical question: How do you negotiate the unexpected, armed only with trust? It's a question that goes to the very heart of jazz – with improvisation as its pulsating core – and it was fascinating to see how different artists addressed it during this year's jazz festival.
Japanese pianist Hiromi left little to chance in her elaborate arrangements; for her, trust meant relying on her trio companions (bassist Anthony Jackson and drummer Simon Phillips) to match her precision and power as she darted between visceral, plunging chords and dazzlingly virtuosic cascades. Perhaps she placed too much trust in her sound engineer: how else to explain the booming, drum-heavy mix that smothered all but her most emphatic solos?
Poor acoustics also compromised Eddie Palmieri's show the following night – though not to the extent that it deterred the dancers, who rushed to the front and undulated ecstatically through most of the concert. For those of us who were only dancing on the inside, it was a shame we had to struggle to extricate the detail of Palmieri's arrangements for his Latin Jazz Septet. Paradoxically, the over-amplification dampened rather than magnified the music's vitality, though there was no doubting the 79-year-old piano maestro's agility, energy and boundless enthusiasm.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/melbourne-international-jazz-festival-review-wayne-shorter-quartet-soars-into-the-cosmos-20160613-gphqed.html#ixzz4BkQOsexA
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