It's a two-family affair at Jazzfest
Chicago Sun-Times
August 8, 2006
BY JOHN LITWEILER

It's fitting that Sunday's highlights at Jazzfest 2006 were two family acts. The festival, sponsored by Jazz Unites Inc., always has projected a friendly, informal family feeling, with crowds of music lovers sprawled over a lawn, with the South Shore Cultural Center on the right and a beach where children splashed in Lake Michigan on the left. Saturday already had brought rhythmically witty singer Andy Bey, brother of Jazzfest founder Geraldine de Haas. On Sunday two performing families - pianists Willie Pickens and his daughter Bethany from Chicago and four Jordan siblings from New Orleans - certainly projected a contrast in family values.
For several decades, Willie Pickens has been among Chicago's finest pianists, a most elegant, flexible artist even as he swung sophisticated harmonic and structural ideas. It's remarkable how thoroughly Bethany has absorbed his concepts and made them her own. In their duets, they took turns playing grand piano and electric piano. Listeners had to watch them to know who was playing at any time - most of the time, our ears weren't enough.

They both phrased in bubbling lines of bebop, both shaping solos in complex ways, contrasting subtle levels of simplicity and complexity. Willie was the Pickens more inclined to play busy, decorative fines and to spice his solos with distant substitute harmonies. Along with jazz standards, they also played a 14th century hymn and, to conclude, Bethany's original tune "Brazilian Breeze." On it, she played a keyboard instrument with a wavery synthesized-guitar sound, while in "Blues March" she soloed on what sounded like a wheezy Farfisa organ.

The Jordans, whose homes were lost to Hurricane Katrina, are sons and daughters of fiery free-jazz saxophonist Edward "Kidd" Jordan. None of them sounds at all like him. Kent Jordan, a noted flutist, piped piccolo solos in double-timed, John Coltrane-like sheets of sound - a strangely effective style that cut like a dull knife. Marion is a trumpeter torn between hard-bop lyricism and flashy displays of his virtuoso technique.

The discovery of the day was young Stephanie Jordan, who charmed the crowd with a singularly sunny vocal style. Here was a forthright swinger with a big contralto voice and a minimum of scatting, altered melodies, dynamic effects and rhythmic distortions. As a result, her words actually meant something, as lovely flute and trumpet obbligatos surrounded her lines of song. Even "Here's to Life" lost its mopey quality. On three songs her sister Rachel, a classical violinist, added undermiked backgrounds.
The day had other delights, especially the straight-ahead drive of trumpeter Tito Carillo's quintet. But headliner Marlena Shaw's belted vocals sounded mannered and difficult to understand.

John Litweiler is a local jazz critic and author.
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