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Summer 2010 Review Part 3 – Nice

[Continuation of the series]

Nice, France: Côte d’Azur

This is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful places on the planet. There is a coast line of about 110 miles, from Monaco in the East stretching all the way to Marseille and Toulon, France in the West, and that stretch is called the Côte d’Azur—Blue Coast. And the water is really blue and filled with lots of topless sunbathers. Ooh la la! Cannes is famous, and so is Monaco, but the French also enjoy Nice and Juan Les Pins, and do big Jazz Festivals in both. So, we do, too.

Busy day… Press is everywhere and we break from our normal protocol and do lots of press on show day, just backstage amongst cozy little white tents for the various artists on bumpy unlevel ground. Dweezil Zappa plays Zappa was on fire, young Zappa continuing, but expanding upon the legacy of his dad.

Their chests are pressed against the fence at the front of the stage. Men, women, and children, boys and girls, all there and buzzing and whistling for us to start long before we can complete the set change. I’m knocked out by all of it.

This program of early music, the first music they ever heard me do (and for those 20-30 years old, a brand new listen), continues to be a real crowd-pleaser. I’m more than pleased myself. As we planned out this musical program around Christmas and New Years of this year, we had high hopes, but the reaction has gone beyond our high hopes. You Don’t See Me, We Got By, Sweet Potato Pie, and Easy are making new friends. This festival has turned into a super-international occasion with music from all over the world presented under the banner of JAZZ. I make congratulations on this from stage and added, “So maybe next year we’ll have a polka band,” and I started singing BA DA DA DAH, BA DA DA DAH, from the famous Beer Barrel Polka. And before I could get to the repeat of that phrase, this French audience in Nice, France was singing along. Oh my God, I was astounded—I think they were, too. A polka, here in Nice.

Need I say more? It was a fabulous fabulous one-of-a-kind night here in the South of France. Thanks to Dweezil for his courage and chutzpah for extending and expanding the legacy… That’s not easy.

I love you, Nice! You see the best of the best music and art and dance and film, and for some reason you keep on inviting me back.

Bravo, Merci, À bientôt, Al Jarreau!

Summer 2010 Review Part 2

In Strasbourg, France, right on the border of Germany, we performed after the Pierre Christophe Group, featuring Ronald Baker on Trumpet. Great, tight group, and they hung around for our set. It was part of the 72nd year of the Strasbourg Music Festival—Not just Jazz—Amazing! Killian, 8 years old, was in the front row, along with 5 other kids across the front. I made sure to make special welcome to them at the first pause in the music. The venue has hung acoustic baffling and curtains, and the sound is sparkling clean and inspiring. And the audience is LIVE and recognizes the very introduction of Look to the Rainbow, and so on and so on. We’ve found a new introduction for Better Than Anything that works great! It opens new improvisational ideas for me.

We find the sweet spot, well down in the set for Says, with its French lyric set in bubby syncopation. In a flash, we’re already at After All and Mornin’, our closers. I can feel the audience hurry to stand up and applaud loudly—They’re surprised that 90 minutes has zipped by. But we all know that we’re gonna come back for more. And we do. With four more songs that cover more ground and territory than was expected. Great audience! I was signing albums and CDs from the stage before the last songs. Thank you, Strasbourg, and let’s do it again!

Vauvert, France. YES, FRANCE! The home of Jazz is America, but France was so quick to adopt jazz as a child of its own, that jazz easily takes its place right alongside Champagne, Bordeaux, and escargot. And the French, in the great tradition of French procedures and culture, have studied Jazz inside and out in a way that we Americans have not, and probably will not. They study the philosophy of things, the meaning of things, and they delight in the pursuit of the inside-out structure of things and the… Liberté, égalité, fraternité, and, oi oi, la philosophie of, even the baguette—French Bread. You know what I mean. A wonderful appreciation for everything, especially the arts.

Vauvert (pronounced vo-VAIR), does its Jazz Festival in a bullring. (I was interested to learn they don’t kill the bull here. They play a cat and mouse kind of game with it. And the matador is praised for his skill in this unusual sport.) A big band opened the night and played great, to 3000 people who saw a rare thing—A kickass big band.

I stepped gingerly over a lot of backstage cables and the steel legs of the stage backdrop, and we’re on, the band hitting just seconds before me and playing me on. Good switch for the audience… The big band first, then me. They’re quick to get and appreciate the new Rainbow music program that harkens to the first times that I ever did music in France. The fresh new Joe Turano arrangements are sparkling and captivating and make for a new listen. Why has it taken me so many years to announce that After All and Mornin’ are David Foster and Jay Graydon arrangements with my lyrics? I mention that, and sense a subtle new appreciation for these classics. Mark and I keep the trip in motion with a vocal percussion encore—only one I know of anywhere—and then we do Roof Garden, otherwise known as “Bananas—everybody goes crazy.” And even though they’ve had a long and full night of music, they finally rush the stage and push past security. I’m immediately deeply touched and choked up, realizing that these people had not been allowed down front during the whole evening. Security, security… sometimes it’s just overdone, causing a missed moment, and that’s what it felt like to me that night. I wish I could have been closer to that group of people the whole night.

The mayor and staff came backstage with a city medal for me. A beautiful thing. I’m in France and I get a medal from the city. Thank you, Vauvert, Love Al Jar—Oh, oh, nevermind. Bus breakdown.

It’s never happened to me before in all my years of touring. But very quickly, we all find ourselves saying, thank you, God: The breakdown happened at the backdoor of the gig, rather than 5 miles down the road, where we’d have been really really stuck and really out of luck. Instead, the staff from the venue kindly gives us a ride right back to the hotel in Nimes, which fortunately still has room for us. Our bus driver John (the best) was bummed out big time. But we do remind him that this really could have been ugly, and he manages a smile, and calls back to headquarters, and they have a replacement bus on its way in moments. We just have to be patient til it arrives the next day. They then took us on to Vigevano, Italy.

The show in Vigevano had us on the bill with the legendary Gil Scott Heron and his group. We play in the courtyard of a fantastic 15th century castle. Onstage, Gil is slender and tall and classy and cool and oh-so-smart, and relevant. A poet. We hugged briefly in passing, again like ships in the night. But deep inside, we both know volumes. The audience is neatly seated in rows with the first row almost 20 yards away. Amazingly, there were 8 or 10 guys, ages 16-25, screaming and cheering in the front rows; their excitement fanned out to the rest of the audience. Their reaction really set the stage for a wonderful night. Whooff, poof, angel dust—It caught me by surprise when out of my mouth comes the theme from The Godfather, a cappella—Bananas. It still feels right now like somebody else sang that line. They cheered out loud like a football game in response to this flash of improvisation. We do this redesigned version of Easy with John Calderon and Larry Williams having some brilliant feature moments… John solos on nylon-stringed acoustic guitar, and then half-way through the solo section, Larry picks up the flute; No one’s ever seen this before. And you hear the combined intake of breath from the audience, and before they can exhale, Larry has moved back to acoustic piano. A magical musical moment’s connection between a musician and the audience, in which they’ve seen a master musician move to a second instrument and play the stew of that second instrument right before their very eyes. Turano does it, too, with his sax. That night, it was special.

I walk off stage right, and before I can get to our van, I realized that there was a large gathering of people just behind a divider. So I spent a few moments doing autographs and shaking hands and hugging necks. What a wonderful night.

In Vigevano, we had purposely booked a small out-of-town hotel for peace and quiet. Milan is an hour away. We were going into a few days off, and need a rest, and this setting out of town among fields should be perfect. The troubles, however, are not yet over. The air conditioning is a whisper in the blistering heat of the Italian summer, and a nighttime attempt to open the window to cool off ends with dozens of zanzare, mosquitos, buzzing around the room. The hotel is not business-oriented, and internet access is limited for the crew. Getting food is an adventuresome saga. All in all, we didn’t rest there as long as expected, and moved quickly onto Milan after our show in town.

We were all very very disappointed when a couple of Romanian dates got canceled. (Reasons still unclear.) Romania has been a wonderful new audience for me during the past few years, and I was looking forward to going back. During the time we had planned for Romania, I took the opportunity to do a lyric for a song on the new Eumir Diodato album. Double Face was the outcome of several days of hard work between me and Joe Turano, my music director. He found a way to set up a makeshift in-hotel recording studio—Thanks, Joe.

[To be continued in the next post]

2010 Summer in Review, Part 1

[Note: This is the first of several notes from Al about the 2010 summer and all its happenings. More on the way.]

Greetings everybody- Long time, no chat. But as I mentioned in my last post, I’m doing very very well. It’s already the end of September. Even though I’m very late in talking about so many of the concerts that I’ve done over the summer, I feel obliged to make some mention of those occasions because they did indeed happen and there were some really special moments that deserve their own courtesies.

As you know, the summer tour in Europe was an incomplete one because of some health issues; BUT, it began with a wonderful date at the Olympia Theatre in Paris. It’s always a special occasion to perform at The Olympia, and so it was again. But this time I was obliged to pay last respects to Francis Dreyfus. He was my first French promoter and in more recent years, established a quite successful record company that Marcus Miller records for. Marcus and I sat together at the memorial service.

I could tell from the audience’s response at the Olympia when I dedicated Summertime to his memory, that there were people there who felt special about Francis as well. Somehow we were able to maintain the flow of an entertaining evening and at the end of the night we were pleased to conclude that this first non-English speaking audience of this summer’s tour liked and appreciated the new program, ‘Look to the Rainbow Reprise’. It includes songs like We Got By and Sweet Potato Pie and Easy—songs that some of these people had heard, but probably 80% had not heard. After a first half of ‘Rainbow’ memorabilia, we came back with some big songs for me in France, Tell Me and Says, with its bubbly French lyric. We closed with 3 or 4 solid hits that included After All and Roof Garden. And said thanks for another special night at The Olympia.

Beautiful Gorgeous Vienna! When you return there again, you realize that your memories could not really hold and contain all the breathtaking visuals and, yes… splendor. We passed the Opera House where we’ve played often, and arrived at a festival location that’s completely new for me. Completely new, and completely unique. It’s on the grounds of a ‘green plant’ that converts 5 million tons of burnable waste per year into clean energy that powers local homes and businesses. The outside looks in the very best way like a kindergartener’s architectural crayon drawings come to life, and there are no hints whatsoever of what goes on inside. We hurried to the stage because the whole festival day is behind schedule and there’s a curfew. “We’re going to do some songs from our first times together, ok?” “OK!” The show was much like the Paris show in approach and response, full of memories for many, and a brand new listen for others. A quick hello to an old friend in the corner, and then we proceed to counterpoint from hard bumpin’ to mellow, with John Calderon joining me down front on This Time. And of course we do Take Five and After All, and we finish on time—Just enough time for a couple of encores, and everyone’s happy! Promoter, too! All of this in a brand new setting—new for me, new for the band, new for the audience. Thank you, Vienna, I love you.

Next stop Salzburg, Austria. So… A big loud thank you to Erich Zawinul who continues to come up with unusual venues (like Finkenstein Castle on the mountain, or Imst in Springtime). And now, here a return to Salzburg on the border, where I haven’t been for a thousand years. Nobody can remember when we were there the last time. I love it. Almost a brand new audience to play for, and to reintroduce to this music after they’ve grown up a lot. I like how close they are to the stage, and I say, “I can smell your perfume and I’m gonna sweat on your new shoes.” And this becomes the tone for the evening. Me and the band, we burned like the dickens, finding a moment to reminisce. “Oh yes, this is the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.” Smiles all around.

At this point with three shows under our belts, we were really hitting our stride in the new program, and that feels great! Feeling the music come together so tight is a wonderful benefit of extended tours, and we were on our way.

Paderborn, Germany: Yes, it’s my first time here—I would need help to point it out on a map. But it’s oh-so-perfect that it is happening. I wish all my promoters in the cities and countries where I work could read this and appreciate my viewpoint about some really important details. I have the most enthusiastic and youthful and loving audience in this country of Germany that any artist could wish for. Why? One really important answer to that question is that since the beginning, we committed to going to all the small towns… taking the music to the people, and so it continues today. (Thank you to my longtime German promoter Henning.) And so, when my old friend a local promoter Ralph and I were sharing our hellos and how-do-you-dos, I told him, “Tonight, we will make friends in this new small town, just like we did in the beginning.” And so we did, to a standing ovation. I love it, don’t stop.

After our show, I had a special visit with a singer named Ana from Paderborn. She may have come in looking for some sort of words of wisdom from an old pro, but before I knew it, the words were coming out of her mouth: “No band, no record deal… I sing because I love it.” Those are the magic words. I dance because I love it. I paint because I love it. I plant begonias because I love it. No one will ever see this, but I will do it because I love it. At the end of the night, she said, tongue in cheek, “Paderborn people never stand up.” I told her, I will sing in Paderborn til the day I die. … Thank you, Paderborn.

One of the most beautiful concert halls in the world, with padded red seats ascending from a stage level to a two story balcony with seats only a hundred and twenty feet away, like an indoor amphitheater. I’m speaking of the Philharmonie, 100 meters away from the cathedral in Cologne. You know the one, at Bischofgartenstrasse 1-5. Postal code 50667. (…Send them a post card!) Tonight, there are two five year olds in the third row, dressed alike, and here they are, all little wide eyes and open hearts. It tugs. I take a moment and talk about all the choices in the universe for kids. There’s opera, and ballet, and symphony, and even Al Jarreau. “I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow, too.” It struck me to sing that, and it began some adventuresome improv flight, which the band immediately picked up on and we proceed through a wonderful evening of old and new music. I took a moment to look around—wow, young audience all around—Twenty to thirty mostly, and lots of teens. And on my ascent up the stairs through the audience to get offstage, I found Suzanne, who shows up with flowers and a letter about her good friend Thomas—She wants to give him a surprise gift of meeting backstage after the show. So we made it happen. It was a fun talk, made even better by another visit with Carol and Garo, my longtime friends. Thank you, Cologne!

[To be continued in the next post]