Vancouver jazz festival — cool start leads to hot Sunday

Festival Review |

Thanks to glum skies, a trimmed budget — and the Canucks' bitterly concluded Stanley Cup bid — the 10-day-long Vancouver International Jazz Festival got underway this past weekend in a rather dampened mood.

Attendance was off in several venues, puddles on the Gastown paving stones discouraged large crowds Saturday and the festival's gala opener at the sumptuous Orpheum Theatre didn't happen till Sunday. Various European bands filled the gap, with varying degrees of success.

But by Sunday momentum had gathered, with sunshine gracing Gastown and two of the most anticipated shows — Darcy James Argue's Secret Society and Wynton Marsalis' Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra — warming up two quite different worlds.

Argue was the festival's best story. The 36-year-old composer/conductor's debut big-band album, "Infernal Machine,' has been the talk of New York for two years, but it was not until 2010 that the festival realized he was an alumnus of North Vancouver's Handsworth high school, where he studied under the city's storied jazz-band director Bob Rebagliati, who also taught pianist Renee Rosnes.

"This is my first professional gig in Vancouver," said the dark-haired band leader, obviously delighted.

The packed house of hipsters on the first floor of the lived-in but cozy Vogue Theatre (the balcony was not open), wildly cheered the hometown-boy-made-good.

With a chewy, innovative band that featured several players who also hail from this area — trumpeter Ingrid Jensen (Vancouver Island), drummer Jon Wikan (Seattle) and Ryan Keberle (Spokane) — Argue delivered a 100-minute set that heaved with great tectonic shifts and a sci-fi vibe, perching intense jazz solos over driving, minimalist pulses and a thunderous underbelly of electric guitar and amped-up acoustic bass.

Seneca Black, one of Argue's trumpeters, played for years with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the more-elegantly tailored band that was dazzling the upmarket crowd across the street at the Orpheum just as Argue began. Marsalis' outfit played a captivating if more traditional set that seesawed between shimmering renditions of Duke Ellington classics — clarinetist Victor Goines on "The Mooche"! — and dizzyingly complicated contemporary fare, such as Joe Henderson's "Inner Urge" and Herbie Hancock's "The Riot."

Marsalis apparently called the latter tune unwittingly, having forgotten Vancouver's post-Stanley Cup melee.

"OK, you got me," he said, when the crowd twittered, then added, "That wasn't a riot. That was a mini-riot. Watts was a riot."

Though Sunday stood out, there was plenty to enjoy earlier. At the Roundhouse, German free-improvising saxophonist Peter Brötzmann brayed before a wailing wall of drums and electric bass recalling the incantatory phrases of Allen Ginsberg's poetry. Norwegian piano trio In the Country enhanced its glacially slow-mo pulse with quietly conspiratorial electronics that conjured whispers in some remote rural cathedral. Over on Granville Island, golden-toned bassist Dan Berglund's band, Tonbruket, often recalled the droll, atmospheric quality of Berglund's former trio, E.S.T.

In Gastown, Quebec pianist François Bourassa's saxophonist André Leroux hit the pavement running, with a thunderous, John Coltrane-like energy. And at Venue, a sleazy downtown disco added this year as a festival outlet, a phalanx of Norwegians called Jaga Jazzist offered an ecstatic, precision-timed tapestry of highly amplified keyboards, horns and vibraphone that conjured the feeling of an amped-up Javanese gamelan.

There's plenty more to come: singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, fadista Ana Moura, jazz/rockers the Bad Plus, bassist Christian McBride, pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba with accordion master Richard Galliano, Scandinavian festival favorite Atomic and the great flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia. Saturday and Sunday shows at David Lam Park are free.

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