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Paris, France – Olympia – 2015

Paris, France – Olympia – 2015

Here we go again. Hip hip hurrah! Super! Wonderful!!! I’ve said it before and probably will forever, Paris, along with Rome, Munich, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, are serious centers for music in this sector of the universe. Lady Gaga and Yo-Yo Ma want to get it right in these places. So do I.

We nailed it at Olympia. Grand Slam. Straight away center field out of the park! All the extra curricular surrounding the Olympia, the epitome of performance venues, is CRAZY. Everyone you’ve ever known since 1977 will be there to say “hello” and “can we talk?!”. And so you do as much as you can…in fact, more than you can. But you maintain focus and ask your manager to take up some of the slack and pressure. He’s good at that.

The Olympia has red velvet seats with a wrap around balcony, and the first row could almost touch hands with me. The main floor comes right up to the front edge of the stage and the electricity flows in a hurry. They’re reacting to everything. Was it like this before? It must have been. Almost a silent dream-like state with confetti falling, unheard laughter, and conversation without sound.

This is the zone! Missing time. You look at your watch, people are leaving, and your saying to yourself, “What?!?! Wait a minute.” When it’s working like that, you move the pieces on the chessboard in slow motion and at will. And the band is part of you and you are part of the band.

It was an intermission set, which makes for a real full evening feel. By this time we’ve hit a very casual, easy-going groove with time for me to chat little “this’s and that’s” with the audience. “What’s your name, young man? Is this your first time?” to a kid 10 or 12 years old. Half way back there’s a lovely lady in a pink dress who is telling her name and when she stands up, everyone screams in applause. Turns out she’s from Brooklyn and she and her husband are taking a little break from the business of making a new line of unique watches. Also a lady crosses in front and hands me a yellow rose. These moments and a quick mention of four or five other venues from the past make things really warm and personal.

I had been flying in my mind since waking up and sitting on the edge of my bed having morning coffee and looking across the street at an apartment building with a balcony and raw iron fence. I really like that time of the day. “Who lives there? What do they do?” I always ask myself. Could I live there? Today on that balcony there was a small pink bicycle for a young girl. Almost instantaneously I saw that little girl growing up oh so very quickly, that bicycle left behind and rusted with rain and weather, and a mother and father out of breath and talking about missing time.

And so there I was with Larry a few hours later doing encores and went to straight to “Waltz for Debby”. It has that theme in it—it’s on the “Accentuate the Positive” album. Wow! Then Larry and I slip into “Shadow of your Smile”. Just me and his piano. This is new territory that contrasts to our other heavier punctuated material. And sure enough we go back to that in our finale with “Mas Que Nada”.

What a night!

Our promoter, Bernard, was all smiles and proud as can be. When we first met he was a 19-year-old tall, skinny kid working for Francis Dreyfus (my very first promoter in France). And now here he is slightly greying and hanging in there with me and Marcus Miller and others.

And there’s Jean-Pierre and Josie. He was Claude Nougaro’s manager. Claude was a very well known French jazz singer/poet. We stay in touch religiously. It’s wonderful and dizzying and pretty soon we say adieu and goodnight and merci, sweet Paris.

See you Italy!

Love,
Al

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Bordeaux, France – 2015

Bordeaux, France – 2015

Some of the best red wines in the world come from the vineyards in Bordeaux. And my guess is that only the French know that it’s way down south near the border to Spain. I was surprised to realize how long it’s been since I played a concert here- I say the name so often because of the concerts that we continue to do in the nearby region (Toulouse, Marseilles, etc.).

When we walked into the concert venue, I immediately smiled and chuckled and said, “Oh yea, baby!” It was a room that was basically a box with a top on it. No seats, shoulder-to-shoulder, belly-to-belly, with the first row pressed right against the front of the stage. It’s on! And so it was.

They screamed when the band walked to stage before me. Intimate? There was a boy down in front seven feet away from me with fingers laced through the barricade like a kid on the playground. And a woman to my right 20 feet away who bounced up and down with every punctuation and drum lick. I tried to hear what she was shouting to me between songs but couldn’t and still I knew what she was saying. All across the first 8 rows of standing people I was so very aware that they were singing the lyric right along with me. WOW! For me it does not get better than this.

And so…the situation got some of the best innuendos and nuances out of the band and me. We put together a program for this summer that has some new songs and new approaches to old songs. All of that came together beautifully there in Bordeaux making the band and me feel like we’re right on target. Philippe Saisse would have cracked up hearing his song “Says” with French lyrics just pop and spark so wonderfully here last night. I try to keep from mentioning new music that we do. In these situations the planned out solos on horn or guitar or flute or drums from Joe and John and Larry and Mark are well appreciated beyond the norm taking things to a new and overall level. There was lots of stuff like that all night long with interactions between the guys on stage and me that we sparked and fueled and caused by the audience’s reactions. I really have to study the show tape and make some asterisks.

Enough Ooohing and Ahhing…

I had some guests after the show who are really important to me. Sassoune was a brilliant jai alai player who came to his first Al Jarreau concert in Biarritz (Basque country, Bilbao moon). I even wore a beret on stage that Sassoune gave me. His wife is from Milwaukee and so they brought me cookies and sweets that she baked for their local restaurant called the Milwaukee Café. Amazing!

Also backstage, with her daughter, Maxime, was the cutest red cheeked Dutch delight that Holland has to offer. Monique is her name. She could be on a postcard in front of a windmill with a traditional apron and dress wearing wooden shoes. She had come to Bordeaux to look for an apartment for her 21-year-old daughter who’ll be a student at a nearby university. Amazing. I first met Monique long ago, when she was a student backstage screaming and giggling and loosing track of her ride back to her apartment. She jumped on the touring bus with me and the guys and we took her back to her place. How wonderfully similar the circumstances are. She brought her young daughter to hear me and sure enough they missed their train so we gave them a ride once again. What a scream! We laughed so hard about that.

Well anyway, we’ll head on into the summer tour with another date at the Olympia in Paris all hopeful and excited about the idea that there are people who still want to hear what we have to say. Thank you, Father!

See you in Paris.

Love,

Al

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Moissac, France – 2015

Moissac, France — 2015

We played in the court yard of an 11^th century Abbey—all stone work with arches and pillars and alters where church services would happen after our sound check. I was in awe. You could almost hear the monks singing in this Cloister. Stone statues taking months to chisel and carve look outward and downward in protection of this sacred place. Oh what amazing things we accomplish when we direct our thinking and doing toward the highest principles. When we huddled up before hitting the stage, Larry gave a very appropriate thanks and invocation. Amen all around.

This was our first night on the European tour and so a screaming audience send off with five encores would have been super fantastic for getting everybody’s energies all charged up. Well this was our first time in Moissac with a new audience of listeners gathered in a church courtyard with statues of saints looking on. So their response, while quite welcoming, seemed a little shy and tentative. But by the end of the evening some very energetic people from the sides and way back came rushing down front and really danced and had fun. And soooooo, almost without missing a beat, Joe Turano walked back out and, with me, starts the chords of the last eight bars of the Gershwin’s’ “Summertime”. Only John Hendricks and I do this portion of the song. In fact I use his lyric, which is as sensitive and poignant as anything in the Broadway musical. “Life should be like summertime”.

Real quickly here, the Gershwin’s were Russian immigrants who were so able to empathize with the black experience during the 1900s marginalized in ghettos, many still working in fields. They captured it so well that it still makes lots of sensitive black folks in America really uncomfortable. Somehow we managed to offer up a lot of that same meaning and even the dancers down front paused for a minute. A little moody, slow funk backbeat helps all of this.

Everyone felt the change of mood in the Cloister and so we gave them some fire-y “Spain”. We all felt really good about saying goodnight at that point. As we walked from the courtyard there were lots of shouting well-wishers reaching out to shake hands and thank us.

We then got on the bus and headed for Bordeaux…like the red wine. Yum! See ya tomorrow.

Love,

Al

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Toronto, Canada – 2015

Toronto, Canada

Good morning. Bonjour. We’re on our way to the airport and just kicked off our summer tour with a beautiful festival night in Toronto. What a fantastic city! Big international cosmopolitan but oh so civilized! My assistant said, “They’re so polite.” He’s right…polite. As we all should be…. sensitivity, humanity. They have a Blue Jay stadium and a Maple Leaves and Raptors arena and a thousand brand new high-rise residential apartment buildings inundating the old traditional downtown and preserving it with new, young business people and workers.

So maybe it’s not surprising that this year they’re celebrating their 27th Jazz Festival, which is so much like the above. Real tradition lasting over 10 days with multiple venues. Big ones, small ones, even local clubs celebrating the spirit of this music and preserving it for the future.

Well, all has not been well here. The winter was brutal and long lasting up until what seems like just a few days ago. Jumping right from winter to summer. No spring! Lips still blue and chins trembling.

We got one more parting shot from Mother Nature with a serious rainstorm that began during our concert. They surly knew about this surprise weather possibility long ago and sheltered the main stage of the festival under a beautiful white tent holding a thousand seats. Out beyond the tent was a close-up standing area with at least as many people as under the main tent. They had umbrellas and seemed to deal with the rain almost as if it was another concertgoer in their midst. Brazil, Florida, and London know this phenomenon well and also prepare for it.

Kurt Elling, Christian McBride, and others are all part of this Jazz Festival, but tonight it would be me and “Soul Understated feat. Mavis Poole”, a young, progressive, soulful funky jazz group since 2008 that has managed to do the elusive thing of combining R&B and Hip/Hop rhythms (not sampled but played by a real bass player and drummer and guitarist) that created electrically sparkly and charged space where horn solos could operate at will—real jazzy. I said to the audience that Miles or Coltrane would love that canvas. Beautiful Mavis Poole slid her vocal tones in and throughout this backdrop daring to not be like Aretha or Chaka. I really loved them and told them so. They’re so good as openers- I think this combination is a good one.

We followed with what I thank God for more and more each day—to have some history and legacy, and yes, even lots of years in this changing and fluctuating profession and art form. My 100 meter times are not the same and my high notes are a little lower, but I have a collection of music from my recorded and performing past that remains a pretty good calling card. These days being new and establishing yourself in this “quick startup” world is a big challenge. So we go to stage every night with a welcomed past and anxious ears and minds hoping to hear the song they danced to on their wedding night or “Boogie Down” that they play for their kindergarten class because of the message.

And so even here in Toronto, Canada, or as it will be throughout this summer tour in Europe, we joyously go to stage and sprinkle that good ole stuff with new arrangements and brand new music that continues to be satisfying and attracts new listeners as well. This Toronto audience was close and nearby to the front of the stage and hot and receptive. They allowed me to chat and reflect a bit during and between songs, which, for me, is of super importance. This intimacy allows folks to enter my world and thinking for a little while. The marvelous and amazing thing for singers is language—words and thoughts and ideas communicated in the most common form of human interaction (speaking and listening). Something special happens when you can keep that as an integral part of your performance.

Of course, I tend to talk too much…

But these days I get to talk about me and George Duke and our old friendship, and then we play “My Old Friend”. That’s important. The people out back in the intermittent rain with umbrellas seemed to not notice Mother Nature’s little entrance as we moved through our program of ballads and fire. They even stood up several times and clapped until we did encores.

If you read again what I said a few paragraphs ago about being grateful, then you have an expanded sense of how wonderfully this season’s concerts, beginning in Japan back in November and continuing through the Spring and now with a great night in Toronto as we begin the summer tour, lift me up and leave me feeling fresh as I work with a new and different physical body. Oh yeah! I left 3 and ½ vertebrae from my lower back at Cedar Sinai Hospital in October last year, but I’m still kickin’. So look out, hear we come, Moissac. Hear we come, Bordeaux and Paris.

Can’t wait to see y’all!

Love,

Al

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Santa Barbara, CA – 2015

Santa Barbara, CA – Lobero Theater – 2015

Playing in Santa Barbara just like Yountville the night before is a very serious reminder that the big city is only part of the world of music listeners. In fact, as a performer, if you want to feel refreshed and rejuvenated, you should be sure to find some audiences that are typically bypassed by most touring groups.

The last time we were in Santa Barbara was six years ago. That’s terrible. That’s no way to treat an audience of listeners and concertgoers who are friends of your music. I can’t help thinking about this kind of stuff, y’all. It’s troublesome to me and I have to take the time to talk about this now while I’m thinking about it.

Right here I have to ask you if you’ve searched out the Shannon West article I posted a few times ago. Part of my takeaway from that article is that, good or bad—and these are my own thoughts and words—this is a brand new day of music appreciation in our country and world that is quite unlike any other time. In short, there is the fiercest competition for the listeners’ mind and eyes and ears that there’s ever been in history. Just for instance, any youngster is lured by the biggest and best film features with animation that makes any and every feat of human ability happen in front of their eyes with all the bells and whistles and guts and gore. And you can even get it on your iPhone or laptop while you are crossing the street and tweeting and texting. Can you imagine John Lennon’s “Imagine” or Police’s “Roxanne” or Green Day’s “When I come around” finding listening space and attention span in this kind of atmosphere? All of this has the effect of scattering a person’s interest so that only the most obvious and base-ish human activities tend to get through…sex and violence and the like. And the younger the observer, the more powerful the lure.

There will always be headliners that sell out 20,000 seat venues to screaming teenagers. But there has always been an audience for the smaller venue…the 12 to 2,500 seater. This audience doesn’t find their interests or musical tastes even demonstrated or shown anymore. They can’t find their favorite artist on the radio or any other form of media. And so obviously that concert promoter who showcased these artists is experiencing low attendance rates.

I’m going to stop here and continue onto Santa Barbara but the conclusions you can draw are clear and obvious.

Anyways, I happily returned to Santa Barbara and reconnected with this audience that I rarely see. And here we are at the Lobero Live Concert Series, which has been going on for 15 plus years. David, the Lobero’s executive director, was quite proud of their work at this venue. He also exuded a quiet confidence that his audience was happily awaiting my arrival. He was right.

These guys really liked our intermission program that featured all the AJ Hits, so to speak, and the new pieces that we’re introducing this season. I love intermission evenings, too. Things are much more relaxed and causal and inviting, giving me time to talk about the George Duke days in the Haight/Ashbury area and other little personal anecdotes.

My friend, DeAnna met with me backstage and brought some wonderful photos of the University of Iowa and “Bodda Bae” and Days of Our Lives. We took lots of pictures with VIPs and special guests and the wonderful & spirited Betty, a Lobero donor and supporter of the concert series. It was a great ending to a great night.

Thanks, Santa Barbara! This was a wonderful return. Let’s do it again real soon!

Love,

Al

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Yountville, CA – Napa Valley 2015

Yountville, CA – Brian Culbertson’s Napa Valley Jazz Getaway – June 2015

Brian Culbertson’s Napa Valley Jazz Getaway…WOW! Now that’s a mouth full. Wow again, folks. I need to stop thinking of Brian Culbertson as the baby in the family. He’s produced and written over 20 popular singles and is in the process of producing his 14^th album. And now he’s hosting this annual weekend festival…and this is year number four! Here recently I’ve mentioned two or three musician/promoter concert and festival organizers. The new breed. The last time I talked about it was Alexander Zonjic (flute player and jazz radio DJ). Nobody’s getting rich. The promoters and administrators love and care about the music and they find sponsors who must be feeling the same way. I like to call them enlightened corporate people. Someday I’ll do an editorial article about that but the long and short is that people who listen to music are smiling and happy and these are good people in the community. That’s healing. And that’s good for corporations and all of us.

So we gathered at the Lincoln Theater, first time for me, and did a really varied and full evening of music with comedy. Tonight would feature comedian Alonzo Bodden, Raul Midon, Eric Marienthal, Brian Culbertson, and of course the Al Jarreau band.

Right!! Alonzo Bodden kicked things off with some funny stories and bits that I could not hear from my dressing room except for uproar of laughter and applause and screams. I love this combination of comedy and music, and I’d love to keep that tradition going.

I hope you’ll find Raul Midon if you haven’t already. He sings and plays guitar like a madman and is thoroughly captivating and entertaining. His vocal range is off the charts and the way he strums and picks and clacks on the body of the guitar completes the rhythmic feel of his song.

When we went on, it had the distinct feeling of first timing! Well certainly it was our first time in this theater, but it also felt as though I’ve never been with this Napa Valley audience before. It’s always wonderful when folks have heard of you and know basically of what you do and are truly anticipating the real live experience. And that’s what we had at Lincoln. And just now as a group we’re also experiencing a breath of fresh spring air attitude in the music as we play and sing.

What I mean is that every touring season is preceded by head and beard scratching question marks about what new and exciting additions you can make to the program of staples that are regulars and constants. I’m not going to mention these new additions now, but they are working so well that it’s making the band’s eyes light up. Those surprises worked great with our Napa Valley revival and new audience. (Napa/Sonoma/Mendocino; this is wine country and lots of vineyards have opened their gates and improvised stages to jazz music for twenty years. But Lincoln is a real theater construction performance venue).

Of course Brian joined me on stage and brought Eric Marienthal and Raul Midon with him. This oh so obvious kind of collaboration on stage during an evening of multiple performers almost always gets neglected and goes undone.

And at the end of the evening when we did a finale of Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t you Worry”, and the audience singing along, it was everything you could have asked for and a bag of chips with a new pickle and a cherry on top J.

We had a wonderful meet and greet after the show with photos and well wishes right down front. Everyone shouting, “Let’s do it again next year!

It really was a great night! See you all in Santa Barbara!

Love,

Al

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