Oregon Music News

Bill Royston

The 2010 Alaska Airlines Portland Jazz Festival kicks off on Sunday, February 21 with a Gospel Brunch. The major national and international artists begin concerts on Thursday, February 24 with Luciana Souza at the Hilton Hotel, Pavilion East and conclude Sunday, February 28 with Dave Douglas & Brass Ecstasy at the Crystal Ballroom.

In between will be Pharoah Sanders, Dave Holland, The Mingus Big Band and three Norwegian bands: Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli, Christian Wallumrød Ensemble and In The Country.

There’s lots more and OMN will be telling you all about it with full coverage. Here’s the whole schedule.

There is one major change this year, Bill Royston founder and face of the Festival has cut his responsibilities down considerably. He is now “Artistic Director.”  The role of  “Managing Director” is now filled by internationally known music industry veteran Don Lucoff who has been publicist and/or manager for many Jazz greats.

To kick off our coverage of the Festival, we talked with Royston earlier this week:

Busy?

I’m taking a deep breath and sitting. I’m fine. (Chuckles)

How’s it going just being the artistic director? How has it changed?

The difference between this year and last year is night and day. It’s a much more comfortable situation. The leadership is clear. I know what my boundaries are. They’re where I want to be. It’s working out really well. (Laughing)

What are the differences?

Right now I can concentrate more on production and making sure that the qualities of performance are where they should be. Not that they haven’t, but I don’t have to work as hard to get there.

I think it’s more a question at this point that we have a good team in place who can handle marketing and ticking and all the things which in the past I felt kinda wore me out.

What kind of production tasks are you talking about?

At this point it’s all the little details. It’s what kind of amp to how many hotel rooms…it’s a constant communication with artist management. I enjoy that. It’s having to sit all day and count numbers. That’s what I don’t like. Whether it’s good news or bad, I don’t care, I don’t like to do that. (Laughing)

Do you get to interact with musicians at all at this point?

Oh yeah. Some of them, like Dave Holland are old, good friends and Dave is managed by his daughter Louise, who is an attorney in New York, and a very sharp lady and I know both of them well. Every once in a while, I’ll be talking to Louise and I’ll say, “I’d kind of like to talk to Dave about that,” and then just pick up the phone and do it.

This business is all about relationships, the longer you’re in it the more you have and that’s how you steer the course.

Pharoah Sanders

Have you been able to talk with Pharoah (Sanders)?

(Big laugh) Not recently, I’ll put it that way. Actually, Pharoah is a man of few words, as you may know. He’s much more rooted and down to earth than most people think and he’s a very soft-spoken, one-to-two-sentence guy.

You’d never think that.

No. My favorite thing about Pharoah…you know the Dos Equis commercial, about the most interesting man in the world? That’s Pharoah doing a cameo in there. They’ve got flashlights and they’re searching through a garden on an old country road in the dark and all of a sudden there’s a two-second picture of Pharoah Sanders wearing this red fez. That to me is Pharaoh. What is he doing there? (Laughter) It doesn’t matter.

It’s hard to imagine someone that expressive on the saxophone not having that much to say.

At this point conversations are mostly with management. Pharoah doesn’t get into flight schedules. He’s a basic, down-to-earth guy. He’s very quiet. It’s not uncommon for somebody who plays an instrument well, to have a personality, at least on the surface, seems very different from the way they play.

Have you learned to speak Norwegian?

I don’t speak Norwegian. I can’t even pronounce it right now, which is the only Norwegian I know. It’s spelled u-t-e-n-j-a-s-a and then three other words. It basically means, “Without Jazz my life would have less meaning.” It’s a slogan that you find throughout Norwegian Jazz Festivals…banners, t-shirts…it’s everywhere. It goes back to when the government first announced that they were going to subsidize Norway’s three major festivals. The official who made that announcement, made that statement.

It goes to the question of marketplace versus subsidy. Here we are in America. We wrap ourselves around this music and we say it’s our own, but we don’t support it. We expect the music will survive in the marketplace like any other art form.

Christian Wallumrod Ensemble

I’ve run into foundations and sponsors in the past few years who say, “Why should Jazz be funded? Why shouldn’t it be like every other ‘Pop Music,’ like Rock or Country?” Because it’ needs to be preserved. Because it’s got an element of American history that goes beyond dollars and cents. Norway gets that and they are now subsidizing the art form in order to perpetuate it.

It’s a cultural, philosophical stand. We’re a free marketplace, they’re more of a Socialist country. They are subsidizing their arts and we’re more like a Darwinian jungle, if you will. That’s part of why I’m glad to be only an artistic director.

A lot of people no nothing about the Norwegian bands in the Festival. Of course that’s one of the beauties of the Festival, of how you curate because they’re always something to be discovered. Is there something that ties these bands together other than they’re from Norway? How do you characterize their music?

There’s a history here. A Jazz festival should be about adventure and discovery. It’s not necessarily seeing what you already know, it’s exploring what you don’t know. It means that our audience has to place some trust in us. It’s very gratifying that it happens here.

What makes Norway so different. It does go back to the subsidy issue. For a country with a population of four million people, they have seven university level Jazz academies, which is rather startling when you think about it.

Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli

Jazz is everywhere in Scandinavia and it goes back to World War II. A lot of African-Americans and particularly African-American musicians in the armed forces chose to expatriate and stay in Northern Europe. The perception at the time was that it was very welcome there, was an open society. What you now see is a third generation that has been influenced by these musicians who settled in the late forties and early fifties.

You had an earlier generation which included Jan Garbarek and Arild Andersen and many others who were perhaps more directly influenced by musicians who had stayed for a time or resided in Norway. Stan Getz and John Coltrane and Dexter Gordon …these were tremendous influences. It changed what had been Norwegian folk music into a hybrid.

Norwegian music today has gone beyond categorization, that’s the common bond. If you ask them what are they doing? They’ll say they’re doing music, improvised music and for the most part, instrumental music. They don’t worry about categories or titles to it. What they’re doing is a new kind of fusion. In the seventies, with Weather Report and Return to Forever, we grew up in a generation that mixed Rock with Jazz. This a new fusion. It’s more of a fusion of improvised music and classical music, which on the surface are contradictory terms. Classical music was always composed.

Norwegian musicians are much more composer oriented than American Jazz artists but they understand and leave plenty of room for improvisation.

Why did we choose these three groups? Because in my three trips there, these are the groups that really knocked my socks off. We’ve worked for almost two years to bring them here and I’m very excited about it.

I think people are interested in finding out what they’re about.

It’s a different vibe. We had Trygve here three years ago and he performed in the church and people walked away stunned. This is the opposite, that was an eleven-piece ensemble. This is your basic jazz duo with accordion and saxophone. (Chuckles) A much more minimalist approach.

Christian’s sextet includes cello, harp,violin, piano, trumpet and drums. That’s as fused as you can get.

For me, I heard this music, it blew me away and I wanted to bring it to our country.

Is there the same reluctance to use the word “Jazz” in Europe as we have among our younger players here in America?

Yes, I think so. The first time I heard someone rebel against that word was Tim Byrne and I think he’s influence a lot of musicians here. But I think, in Europe, those conversations happened ten years ago and they’ve been resolved. They’ve moved on. Here, we’re still hung up on semantics.

When we formed the Portland Jazz Festival we had a healthy argument about whether to use the word Jazz. It was that the alternatives would have meant so much more description and explanation, that it wasn’t worth it. “The Portland Contemporary Improvised Music Festival”….you’re not going to get that on a street banner!

Are you going to be able to sit and enjoy the performances this year more than other years?

No. (Laughter) We have a rule, you look at the front line of the stage, everything from that front line back is ultimately my responsibility. Everything from that front line forward to the opening door of the theater is now Don’s responsibility. Don’s a pro and he get that. Just knowing that things are a bit smoother than they were in the past makes my life easier.

It’s my goal to be in every event for at least five minutes!