Anguilla Tranquility Jazz Festival 2009, Straight No Chaser is curtains (update 3)

Anguilla

makeover 3 on November 16  2009

Anguilla’s Tranquility Jazz Festival celebrates birthday number seven with four days of top-notch Jazz and other improvisations at the usual venues, CuisinArt Resort and Spa for the main course and Johnno’s in Sandy Ground for dessert.

For those persons searching for a real, unadulterated Jazz Festival in the Caribbean region, the Anguilla Tourist Board and BET Event Productions extend an invite to revel on the British Dependent Territory – as this Woodshed Warrior has done in the past – from November 12-15, 2009.

Going by that overwhelmingly wonderful experience of mine and from all other reports, this year’s patrons will be wowed by a world-class roster of the highest pedigree, supported by a remarkable line up of under-cards.

At the top of the international food chain are Rachelle Ferrell, another Jazz singer who has also found some success in the pop arena.  Ferrell performed on opening night, Thursday, November 12; the grayed pianist Ahmad Jamal whose rolling fingers on the grand could not be more colourful.  Jamal did Tranquility Jazz on Friday, November 13.

Diane Reeves made her appearance Saturday night above Cuban born pianist Elio Villafranca.

Grammy award-winning Jazz vocalist Dianne Reeves set the record straight with consecutive Grammy awards in the Best Jazz Vocal Performance category for three recordings (The Moment – Live in Concert  (2000), The Calling (2001), A Little Moonlight (2003).  She then made that four Grammys in a row in 2006, but this time it was for the soundtrack album to the film Good Night, Good Luck (Concord), which was voted the best Jazz vocal album.  A regular touring partner is the Reuben Rogers, born in the USVI of Anguillian parentage.

Pianist Villafranca is yet another of a long, long line of Cuban musicians whose explorations into their uniquely rich cultural and spiritual traditions – with those firm umbilical ties to ancestral roots lodged on the African continent – have caught the imagination of the serious listener bar none.  He alone is worth the flight or sail to the island.

Enough could not be said of one opening act, a local Anguillian Jazz artiste who would have routed the consciousness of even the most cynical and passive of Jazz naysayers who might have headed to the Cuisinart on the second night of the Festival (Friday, November 13) for anything but the Jazz.

Jaine Rogers’ mid-range vocals, crisp and crackly like walking on twigs,  evoke emotions of travails and yearning in the attentive that belie her age and her recent appearance on the landscape as a bona fide recording artist.

She must surely have gotten “Under Your Skin” at Cuisinart.  Jaine Rogers was accompanied by Christian Amour (pno), Jocelyn Ménard (sax), Alex Bernard (cb) and Dominique Bougrainville (dms).  Rogers opened for Ahmad Jamal.

The jury is out on the other Caribbean Jazz acts, British Dependency of Ruel Richardson, Darius James and Jonathan Warrington and New York based In The Light with Rona Allen, born of the British Virgin Islands.

This Scribe has not crossed paths with British Dependency and will not judge In The Light by their showing at Jazz on the Hill, Virgin Gorda (May 2009) where an under-par sound engineer crashed their party.

British Dependency warmed up the J-Fans on Saturday for Villafranca and Reeves and then joined forces with In The Light for the wind-down beach party at Johnno’s Sunday.

But as for Tranquility Jazz Festival, Straight No Chaser, the jury verdict is unanimous, “Guilty” for a darn great party.

Sources: anguillajazz.org, sflcn.com