Throughout the week, Nublu in Alphabet City has also hosted nightly satellite shows. This is a festival that continues to question what it means to host a music festival, particularly one that aspires to represent an entire protean genre. And, especially in marathons, it continues to provide opportunities to be surprised, to test your expectations of hot new bands, and even to be usefully let down by artists you thought were great.
Speaking of surprises, my biggest surprise of the weekend was Zacchae'us Paul, a pianist and vocalist increasingly known for his work with Melanie Charles, and who may soon break out on his own. Accompanied by a five-piece band, he danced in and out of funk, jazz-rock fusion and a kind of futuristic gospel. His trumpet player, Milena Casado, was a revelation. Then, when young Baltimore-based trumpeter Brandon Woody took his seat, things improved two more notches. On the last song of the set, Woody and Casado traded lines, bringing forward the old idea of a cutting contest, taking advantage of a rising tide rather than a tête-à-tête.
The greatest claim to greatness came not from a jazz musician, but from a poet: Saul Williams, onstage at Nublu on Friday night, accompanied only by an electronic musician. “What do we know about history / when all it does is repeat itself?” he asked the audience. “But we're not here to repeat/we're here to break cycles.” There was a roar of hopeful assent from a crowd hungry for a message that could meet this political moment.
If Winter Jazzfest offers an organic reading of the many nascent forces driving music, Unity Fest presented itself more as a cut-and-dried sampling of the well-known subgenres that today fall under the label of “jazz.”
Representing Latin jazz was Sonido Solar, a youth group that has been advised by Eddie Palmieri and that played an arrangement of his song “Puerto Rico” in a serious salsa-dura style. There was free jazz with historical roots, courtesy of the center's dean William Parker and his ensemble, In Order to Survive. There was John Coltrane-style avant-garde jazz from the mid-1960s, courtesy of Scatter the Atoms That Remain and a first line of stellar guests (trumpeter Randy Brecker and saxophonists Billy Harper and Isaiah Collier).
