Portland Jazz Festival highlights African-American and Jewish collaborations

The Portland Jazz Festival, which kicks off Friday, often hangs its shows on a thematic frame. Past themes have been the historic legacy of Blue Note and ECM records and the explosion of new jazz from Scandinavia.

For 2011, the theme is Bridges and Boundaries: Jewish & African Americans Playing Jazz Together.

It's a rich idea, though not particularly well fleshed out in the programming and also oddly irrelevant to Portland, which, according to the U.S. Census has one of the smallest African-American populations of any major American city and a small (less than 1 percent) Jewish population, as well.

But theme aside, artistic director Bill Royston, as always, has booked a great lineup.

Esperanza Spalding, the thrilling, Portland-raised bassist and singer who may well be clutching a Best New Artist Grammy by the time the party starts, is the festival's official Artistic and Community Ambassador. The Cohen siblings, from Israel — clarinetist and saxophonist Anat, trumpeter Avishai and saxophonist Yuval — are on the bill, as are clarinetist Don Byron (appropriately reprising his brilliant Mickey Katz project of daffy popular Jewish music), violinist Regina Carter, pianist Randy Weston, tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman and the SF Jazz Collective.

Royston said the idea for the theme came from an article by jazz critic Nat Hentoff about how jazz historically has brought Jews and blacks together. Indeed. The first racially integrated band was led by a Jew — Benny Goodman — and some of the greatest American popular songwriters — Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein — were Jewish and their work provided the raw material for jazz improvisers.

Early on, jazz attracted a progressive Jewish following, including many of its best critics (such as Hentoff himself) — and the jazz business was often run by Jewish entrepreneurs, though in that case the situation created divisions rather than harmony. Finally, East European klezmer music shares a good deal with jazz.

The Portland festival touches on some of these relationships. Avishai Cohen, Dave Douglas' successor in the trumpet chair of the SFJazz Collective, leads a tribute to Stevie Wonder. Beth Israel Synagogue offers a klezmer brunch. Israeli clarinetist Oran Etkin heads up a band of Malians, and keyboard man Warren Byrd is bringing his hip hop-influenced group, the Afro-Semitic Experience.

But attempts to tie other acts to the festival theme — such as the fact that Redman is the offspring of an African-American father and a Jewish mother, or that Carter's research for her brilliant album "Reverse Thread" led her to discover a group of Ugandan Jews — are flimsy. And while it's interesting that Portland's traditional Jewish and black communities are on opposite sides of town and both neighborhoods were sliced apart by freeways, this fact has nothing to do with Portland's musical history.

On the other hand, obvious programming choices have been overlooked — such as New York composer John Zorn, who spearheaded the Radical Jewish Culture movement and came up on Manhattan's old Knitting Factory scene, where African-American and Jewish music freely intermingled; or, say a program highlighting the work of Jewish songwriters.

In truth, the festival theme may well get its most exciting elaboration not from the music but from a Feb. 25 panel discussion featuring Spalding, Byron, Anat and Yuval Cohen and Portland pianist Darrell Grant.

Anat Cohen, whose warm, flowing sextet with her brothers is aptly called Braid, suggests viewing the theme as being less about African Americans and Jews and more of a general message about multiculturalism.

"I think the message here is beyond the music," she said by telephone from Miami. "It's broader than the history of jazz. It's about the idea that there is a way we can communicate. That music is an international language — like the language of love."

Music does have a way of miscegenating, politics be damned. Growing up in Tel Aviv — like New York, a city of immigrants — Cohen said she heard Brazilian influences in the music of singer-songwriter Matti Caspi without knowing it was Brazilian.

"Years later, I came to study at Berklee [Boston's famous music school] and somebody said, 'Hey, I'm going to play you this Brazilian music,' and I said, 'No! This is an Israeli song!' Because I heard it in Hebrew."

Multiculturalism comes second nature to Cohen. Brazilian choro music is an important part of her repertoire, as are Afro-Cuban music, New Orleans beats and Israeli folk songs. Her albums, "Noir," "Poetica" and "Notes From the Village" have garnered well-deserved critical praise and she was chosen as a Rising Star on clarinet by Down Beat magazine.

Anat and her brothers grew up playing together — Yuval, at 37, is the oldest; she's in the middle — and she relishes any chance she can get to play with them, as Yuval lives in Israel and she and Avishai are in the States. They recently made a European tour.

"I didn't even look in their eyes, the whole show," she said. "I can feel their breath. It's really an incredible, intimate, special experience. It's very telepathic."

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com