KC Jazz Club 9/9/02

by Alan Greenblatt

A weekend at the Kennedy Center: The newest jazz venue in town is the KC Jazz Club, the conversion of the Kennedy Center's old "education resources center" (i.e., its library), into a stylish little club. The whole room is decked out in black velvety curtains and quietly colored lighting, meant to look like a nightclub of the pre-video screen era with about 40 little cocktail tables, overpriced drinks and swanky buffet snacks and no smoking. The sound system is good, the ceiling is high allowing for a sufficiently high riser that you can actually see the performers and the place is small enough for easy interaction between the performer and audience. In short, it's a winner. All the shows are $22.50 and happen at 8 and 10 pm. Go for the later set, if you can. They'll be warmed up and will play about a half-hour longer.

The inaugural concerts this past weekend and the one coming up all feature artists off the St. Louis-based MaxJazz label. An excellent pianist named Bruce Barth will be performing Thursday and then he and his trio will be backing Carla Cook and LaVerne Butler on subsequent nights.

We went Saturday night to hear Rene Marie, a jovial sort of performer. She danced so hard to "What a Difference a Day Makes" that she lost an earring. On uptempo songs, she makes hand gestures for practically every word like a dancer in a Bob Fosse musical. But she's a serious singer with a low voice,

great pitch and a way of drawing out all the lovely angst from a ballad like "Detour Ahead."

What sets Marie apart from a lot of other pretty voices, I think, is her musical intelligence, her ability to completely recast familiar material. I loved her slow, soul introduction to "Surrey With the Fringe on Top." And it's not every jazz singer you'll hear perform a song by Sarah McLachlan and close with "Ode to Billy Joe." She makes this material, seemingly so different from the usual Irving Berlin/Gerswin stuff, sound natural in this idiom by paying attention to the words, telling a story simply, but also by bending a melody to her purposes. "A Foggy Day," for instance, to take note of a Gershwin number, became an exercise in pure rhythm. She threw out the melody almost entirely, the way other soloists might after performing it straight one time through. But the new product that she came up with worked.

This is material she's worked with for a while. Almost every song she performed appears in much the same way on one of her two albums. She's also worked with the same trio for about a year and they were a big help, the light-fingered pianist John Toomey, the smiling bassist Elias Bailey and the excellent drummer Howard Curtis. Curtis offered classic proof that a drummer doesn't need to bang around too hard to change the beat profoundly.

While Marie was singing upstairs, Daniel Alexander and the Peligro Orchestra were providing salsa music for dancing by young people in tight clothing on the Kennedy Center's river terrace. We only snuck in one dance before the jazz show, but the night before we had been there for Eric Felten's swing dance concert.

It was truly like your dream of romantic big band concerts of the past, hearing Felten's 16-piece band blurt out brassy arrangements of old Glenn Miller and Count Basie tunes and looking at them backed by big trees and the river. Even the air traffic controllers at National Airport cooperated with the soft spirit of the late summer night, seeming to wait until the band was between numbers to send jets in for their landings.

There's dancing again this weekend with the Lasalle Dance Orchestra leading ballroom dancers from 8:30 to 11 on Friday and the Orioles, the Jewels and the Velons providing the soundtrack for r&b and doo wop stepping on Saturday. There are lessons at each show and plenty of young women looking for partners.

Finally, yesterday was the Kennedy Center's open house, featuring backstage tours, kids drawing with chalk all over the long driveway, performances by local jazz stalwarts Dick Morgan, Keter Betts and others and the always-popular Eddie from Ohio, etc., etc. There thousands of people but the event was fairly well-organized.

I have faulted the Kennedy Center in the past for being a mere shopping mall for culture, a warehouse for cheesy pops performances and bad Broadway touring shows. It is still that, but the current management seems to be shooting for something greater. The Sondheim Festival showed that this could be a truly generative performing arts festival, the KC Jazz Club shows that the center can fill a big void in the local music scene and the many free performances such as the nightly Millennium Stage concerts show that this is a center actually opening itself up to the citizens of Washington. It used to feel like the place was run for suburbanites who would park under the place and never set foot in the city. Now, even though the area around the center is one big construction site, the place feels more welcoming than ever.

p.s. Despite going at greater length than normal, I wanted to pass on Adam Graham-Silverman's comments following my recent review of the play "Recent Tragic Events," which got a qualified rave from the Washington Post:

Just wanted to pitch in with my two cents on Craig Wright, who is, I believe, a Minnesota playwright who writes plays about the fictional Wobegon-wannabeland of Pine City, MN (despite the fact that there is an actual Pine City, MN, in which I have played tennis tournaments). I saw one such play at Minneapolis' Jungle Theater last winter. It had won some small awards, but it was such drivel. The plot involves a young woman knocked up and deserted by a guy off fighting in a war -- I think the Korean War. Her mother, believing he's never coming back, sets her up with the local mortician's son, whose descriptions of embalming are one of the play's few redeeming moments, just for their humor. The two are just hitting it off when the guy comes back from the army, and the three of them spend the rest of the play in a confused, sentimental, overwritten mess trying to figure out how to live their lives. They decide all three of them can raise the child. What a wonderful world!