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Miami

Thank you for your white blossoms and pink blossoms and tiny new bright green leaves. Your Spring has delighted my eyes and nose. Patrick and I stopped to take pictures on the morning mini-burn, remembering two years ago in France. It’s that bright new glow on people’s faces that comes with short sleeves and shorts.

Wow, Miami, Jazz in the Gardens… WELL DONE YOU GUYS! FANTASTIC! OFF THE HOOK! … I mean just four letter words all over the place—oooooowee! 20,000 people in the parking lot of the Miami Dolphins stadium… You can actually see the stadium just a stone’s throw away, AND ALL FOR JAZZ! Jazz was the superstar on stage today. It was like every jazz lover in the state of Florida was there! Rubbin’ shoulders and bumpin’ knuckles, and sharing glances that come from so deep in the private personal heart and soul of the sensitivities that typically happen only in church. I mean people sharing something so personal and private which they are convinced is a marvelous secret and they smile knowingly at each other. Like church.

Really really big church!

Really big! The stage was 200 feet wide looking from left to right, and from the front to the back of the audience it was 3 football fields. No, definitely not the Blue Note or the Half Note, with smoky little jazz club intimacies.

Sooooooo, now you better shift gears and kick in the afterburners for some warp speed, Scotty! I’m always talking and raving about close intimate rooms where they can hear your heart beat in the soft quiet notes, and how that very quietness dramatically exaggerates the big stuff. Oh yes, we made it happen today out there in the sun, with people milling about and moving around.

We finished a really big You Don’t See Me with larger than life expressions and gestures on my face. Kaboom! Then Larry reverses field and directions and tiptoes the piano introduction into We Got By… That is a really courageous and brave transitional move with all that action out there, but Larry hit it downtown and chilled ‘em out and set me up beautifully for a really quiet front on We Got By. Warp speed to a motionless quiet hovercraft! You go, Larry! All within six to eight seconds. They nodded up and down and said mmhmm when I started “Hardly had a bellyful,” then Turano gets them rocking back and forth with a tenor solo that gets every horn players attention. The church choir does a few by and bys, and hello, it’s John Calderon closing it out with some almost legs-spread-hair-on-fire guitar-phenom-conducted chords, and then we’ve basically all gone from quiet church to Whitesnake and Jimmy Hendrix in three and a half minutes. Go John! Al
Jarreau got people!!

And so it went like that… For 50 short minutes.

Layla Hathaway was just before us, and Heads of State just after.
Lauryn Hill closed out the night– that’s a lot of music in one sitting. Saturation sets in, so you better be big and loud and animated. I danced (oh yeah!) and waved my hand with “Somebody say yo!” and did a little Mick Jagger duck walk, and did a whole lot of singing of high notes and low notes. All this while Chris and Mark kept it solid as a rock though all of that madness. Even changed the songs in the middle of the set on the fly.

We didn’t think John Calderon down front doing a quiet duet with we would work, so we stayed warp speed with boogie down. Whoops! There’s a Jumbotron behind me with a 30 foot face of Al Jarreau. I almost jumped off the stage into the first row. What a wild afternoon. We started at 6 in the sunlight and headed backstage to do photo op by 7. There were a lot of very happy local people, including the promoter and backstage staff who were really happy we had come, and gave a “Great Performance, Al.” I had kidded with the audience earlier, “It was about time you guys invited me- ah don play dat!”

Thank you and congratulations, Miami Gardens! Please do invite me again. We have a lot of lost time to make up for. Thanks for making it a beautiful and wonderful and comfortable Springtime rather than a hot humid August. We loved it.

I hope I didn’t bore you with this stuff that seems to me to be the more interesting aspects of what I and the group do. Also, we welcomed Ryan Adam Jarreau (my son!) to the team for the first time this weekend. He’s now part of our traveling group—Yaaaaaay!

-Al (and God Bless us, every one)

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Minsk (Part 2)

We’re onstage at 7pm—Oh yeah?? Yeah!! We can tell immediately that there is an excitement that has carried over from soundcheck when a pretty big group of symphony orchestra members listened in, and now had come back and brought their feelings with them to the whole audience. The audience is close, and shouts and applauds their approval of our program that “starts from the very beginning.” They get it. Even though I say it in English. This is amazing!

They transformed the Philharmonie into a rock hall!

It flits across my mind as I sing… They hardly know me. All they’ve heard is my recorded music, never live. Only word of mouth comments. And here they are, totally open, bright eyed and expectant, and joyful.

Yes, and one guy in the right balcony box (so close I could toss him an apple underhand) is so excited that he’s standing up and walking and yelling at the top of his lungs something in Belarussian, which I, of course, don’t understand, but he’s so loud and insistent that he stops us all in our tracks. Me and the audience, quietly waiting (laugh, laugh, laugh), until he has had his say. “OK, alright,” I say, and we continue.

Raw enthusiasm just barely held in check. In the song This Time, there’s a final word and note that I always ask the audience to sing… “Time.” When I gestured for them to sing the final word, a man in the sixth row just poured his voice out louder and louder, with this huge smile of delight in his eyes, looking right at me. I can see him now. He’s a first.

It was a fantastic night with a great audience, and we decided on the spot to do Mas Que Nada as the encore. We somehow learned that this would complete their wish list. This just might have been the best sing-along ever on the ‘Oh-pah, Oh-pah, Oh-pah’s at the end. They’re all on their feet. So I and the band lock arms and walk to the front of the stage and do a big long bow, holding it and holding it and holding it… until they all screamed—We stood up and waved goodnight.

I wanna go back tomorrow. Thank you, Philharmonie, and thank you Maxim and the team, and thank you MINSK!

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Vilnius, Lithuania

We were all still reeling and flying high from St. Petersburg as we hop onto a short flight that gets us into the Vilnius hotel by 1pm. It’s bright and sunny and so are our spirits as we head into a half hour press conference with 20 or so journalists and photographers. I’m really pleased about the anticipation that I feel in the air as we conference and get settled in the hotel.

OK! Alright!! It’s a sports arena! I’m into it. I dig it. It feels casual, relaxed, and loose, with a scaffold stage that actually makes the space smaller and more comfortable than you might first expect. Somewhere in my mind’s eye, I see ‘awesome’… Great Concert. I’ve mentioned so often the experience of doing a concert in an unexpected environment and basically making the most of what’s there. And finding that unusual situation to be just super-conducive to a fun environment! Here we are with a bunch of folding chairs on the main floor, describing an area 120 feet wide and 100 deep. And then bleacher seats wrapped around this, making a small indoor amphitheatre. First row was arm’s length away.

We’re all a little nervous about our late start, but you can hear the buzz in the air. The audience is expectant and loosey-goosey-juicy with big smiles and a cheer as the lights dim and we hit the stage. Our gang feels it, and the band is burnin’ and the promoter’s grinnin’. Yes, as Aldra, our local promoter’s assistant, would later laughingly declare, they were so young! Basically 25 and younger across the first four rows.

Lots of people will remember this as the ‘Little White Bear’ night. I will. A pretty young girl in her teens, 15 to 18, came to the edge of the stage and handed me a little white bear with a red collar. They all oo’ed and ah’ed—Me too! I held that bear and sang to it and danced with it, literally, as we closed the first half of the program.

I walked back out with the bear for the second half… me and Larry: Your Song. I set the bear on its own high stool, letting it look out at the audience just in front of Larry’s rig. The continuity was tangible. I sang directly to the bear, and to two little girls, six or seven years old, in the front row. I thank their moms for bringing them.

The band grooved and bumped the funk. Turano and Calderon screaming and punctuating You Don’t See Me and Sweet P. Pie into chest-thumpin’ funk. Earlier that evening, Larry had made me cry with his improvised intro, his own choosing, into We Got By.

At some point that night, I did a little Mick Jagger strut across the stage, duck flapping my arms, lips and booty poked out as much as I could. Oh, what fun! That’s the sh—tuff, y’all. Patrick said the crowd went “bat-shit crazy” when we did Five. Which kind of describes the feeling for the whole night. I would take that as the standard for any night. Real complete!

Al by Al

Thank you, Vilnius! Off we go to Minsk!

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Minsk, Belarus

It’s a gorgeous cold, snowy, sunshiny morning. You can feel the cold air slip into your lungs as you breathe deeply, once again savoring the fabulous night before in Vilnius. We took a day bus for a 4 hour ride through the snowy countryside… all the trees icy frosted white branches. Stunning, if you’ve never seen that before… Every twig!

The border crossing from Lithuania into Belarus is a shock to the system. Maybe the border from Mexico into the US has a vague resemblance. What is striking is the “security measures” that you feel. On we go to Minsk, Belarus, and we get the biggest shock of our young lives. What a gorgeous, pre-war and post-war city this is. This city was 90% leveled from World War II bombing, and the rebuild is magnificent. 20th Century communism under Stalin really adored classic Greek and Roman structures. It’s everywhere and gorgeous.

We arrived and went straight to a press conference at the Philharmonie, where we played the next night. They welcomed me like a real legendary guy. The staff and directors of the Philharmonie sat in on the press conference. Their questions were wonderful to hear and reflected how excited they were that I had come to visit, and I was feeling the very same way. I’ll be back with some comments on the concert.

Maxim, our promoter on this run, was born here, and with his longtime friend Vitale hosted a fabulous dinner. I had my second outdoor long walk exercise in a square that was a half-mile across and a mile long. I haven’t walked outside for a long time. It felt great.

More to come!

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