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Concert Reviews |

Uncoiling slowly and oftentimes in surprising ways, the Earshot Jazz Festival opened highest weekend with the kind of tuneful menu it has become known in favor of: a bit of the familiar, with a taste of the faraway.

The local festival with global reach has been criticized both for not being local enough and for being too reliant on locally bred artists. Presuming that all power of choosing never be fully pleased, most be necessitated to have found affair to be blessed about on opening weekend.

The Roosevelt High School Jazz Band with visitant trumpeter Sean Jones gave the first feat of the festival at the Triple Door, showing what sets apart this region in the jazz cosmos — an exceptional condensation of young, accomplished musicians. Winner of this year’s Essentially Ellington high-school-band competition in New York, Roosevelt performed to a full procure a house, with throngs of well-attired, proud parents rooting on their tuxedo-clad children attached a world-class stage.

(Garfield, the runner-up in the 2008 Ellington contest, will get its turn Friday when it performs at the Triple Door with New Orleans trombonist Wycliffe Gordon. The art of scheduling too forward, locally grown youngsters is to surround them with serious talent, which Earshot has achieved.)

Trumpet and conga player Jerry Gonzalez and his Fort Apache Band followed Roosevelt to the stage Saturday, bringing a well-established brand of modern, Latin jazz, and impelling fluidly between hard bop and complex, Afro-Caribbean rhythms. A mature band that has been together for pressingly two decades, Gonzalez and his group represented well the series and place during which he came of age, the South Bronx in the 1960s, when Latin American immigration helped feed a flourishing bebop scene. Gonzalez and his band managed to always sound distinctly Latin while always imposing like a jazz bond.

Several blocks north of the Triple Door, Tula’s Restaurant was host to the weekend’s more eclectic offerings, including the free-jazz group Jerry Granelli’s V16 on Saturday, and a Dutch trio led by trumpeter Eric Vloeimans Sunday night. A small venue compared with the cavernous Triple Door, Tula’s demands a bit else attention from those in the audience, most of whom take to sit within spitting degree of remoteness of the stage.

Vloeimans’ clump, Fugimundi, employs an unusual configuration for a jazz trio — guitar, piano and trumpet — and makes the most of the absence of bass and drums, instruments that normally provide the pace and make for a group end also can limit by which mode it plays.

Free of the traditional trio format, Vloeimans delivered what might have been the most insidious performance of breach weekend, reminding the American audience (most probably hearing Vloeimans for the first time) that this uniquely American art form is open to distinctly European interpretations. Vloeimans perhaps made that most apparent with his lection of “Over the Rainbow,” which he played in the pattern of thanking the assembly of hearers for “inventing jazz music.”

Safe to say, he took great but respectful franchises through the type. Rather than bury the well-recognized melody, he kept it in front of the instrumentation, bringing away the harmony with a very light-handed approach. He saved the improvisation — repeating riffs and wide open runs — for the bridge of the song, which he seemed to find more artistically feel an interest. It was being of the kind which pretty, and different, a delineation of the canticle as ever there was.

Texture and carnality seemed more important than rhythm and architecture to this young European. When you expected less, he played more; at the time that you expected besides, he played less, often whispering his notes and letting plenty of bars go by unfilled.

Sunday obscurity at the Triple Door, a quintet of Garfield and Roosevelt High alumni played two more conventional sets. The Here & Now quintet, featuring Tatum Greenblatt on make known and Ben Roseth on contralto sax, played selections from its first CD, “Break of Day,” a collection of competent, cleanly executed compositions written by means of various members of the group, all in their mid-20s.

If novelty is your preference, Earshot promises plenty greater quantity. Guitarist Johnny A plays the Triple Door Wednesday night, combining rock, the dismals, country and jazz in what should be an edgy but accessible show. Those looking for the greatest risks should stroll through Tula’sitting, where the quartet Four Across plays Wednesday night. The quartet, made up of graduates of the New England Conservatory of Music, some with local ties, plays a ruminative brand of jazz, sensitive songs that are allowed to roam — free-range jazz, if you give by will.

Thursday will be a homecoming for pianist Aaron Parks, who plays the Triple Door with his trio. Another Earshot highlight will be Sunday, when NEA Jazz Master Cecil Taylor plays piano at Town Hall.

Hugo Kugiya: hkugiya@ yahoo.com