Category : diary

Venice/Marghera – 2015

Venice/Marghera – Nave di Vero – 2015

Oh wow! We were in this hotel last year. I remember it. Not many places with manicured spacious gardens and beautiful views outside. Nice! We just took an 8-hour drive and this sure is one of the times where everyone is glad about late-ish concert starts in Italy. As we approached the new mall I find myself saying what I said last time. “Where are the gondola’s? Where are the boats?” Well it turns out that we’re almost a half hour car ride from that part of Venice. I find myself going, “Aww damn,” again. Can you imagine how many years I’ve known about gondolas and museums and treasures and haven’t been there yet? You can’t tell anybody.

Now I remember the mall once we were properly inside. It’s a big long walk or ride on a cart to your dressing room. You’ve guessed by now…walking distances impress me. One day you’ll understand! We’re gonna get to that though…

We did a sound check and talked about some little fixes that we need to make in our new program and tried to adjust for the bounce back of sound from the 100 ft. high atrium ceiling. But I really think you would be impressed with this new kind of performing venue. It’s so relaxed and casual and comfortable. There’s no special dressing up and driving downtown, etc, etc. Just grab your kids and your wife, buy a t-shirt and some swim shorts, grab a hot dog and a drink, and listen to who??? Oh that’s Al Jarreau! And pretty soon there’s been 90 minutes of missing time. You were just abducted!

And something about this energizes the band in a new and special way. It sure does that to me. The promoters get it too. They’re seriously aware of this new find and how the people like it. Amazingly we can do the quietest ballad and it works….Encores, too. It’s amazing.

We could have played on and on, and as I left the stage I was immediately in the courtyard of the mall with 200 hundred screaming people waving CDs and LPs to sign. And I stayed for a little while to do that.

I still hope that someday we’ll play in that fabled part of Venice with gondolas and museums and medieval treasures, but for the moment, I’m thrilled. Stanley Clarke and the Yellow Jackets will come in a few weeks…how great!

Thank you, Venice. Let’s go to Rome!

Love,

Al

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Caserta, Italy – 2015

Caserta, Italy – 2015

We took a 22-hour bus ride through the beautiful French and Italian countryside, including the Mont Blanc tunnel (Alps). This was our first long bus ride and I loved it. Hanging out on the bus with the band is totally fun and uproariously entertaining. John and Chris and Mark do some details about their music studies in Houston as high school kids and young college students. Wow, they had some great teachers and intense study routines! My mouth and eyes are wide open in envy. That’s the sh**! Texas??? Of course lots of know about the great music program at North Texas State where they do great work in jazz studies. But when these guys talk about how broad the arts programs are in Texas to include across the board arts I find myself in shock. Conservative Texas?? And it’s still happening today. That’s wonderful!

At a truck stop, I buy some comfort goodies: potato chips, cookies, and a big ole cheese and bologna sandwich—all the stuff my doctor would be horrified to know about. And my response to him that the whole band can here is, “cool it doc, I’m on tour. This one’s for me.” Of course the highlight of things is everyone’s satisfaction with the night before in Paris. Smiles all around.

Italy’s been a friend of my music since the early days. And we very often find ourselves playing city-sponsored free concerts in the square. This has drawn a noticeably youthful audience that came with their own curiosity and went home to talk about this Jarreau guy and then went off to find my music. They are characteristically Italian in their enthusiasm and joyfulness almost bouncing up and down.

And so in the last few years we’ve decidedly played in some giant shopping malls throughout Italy and found ourselves with a brand new kind of listener. There’s a husband, wife, and kids shopping for clothes or a toaster and stopping at the food court for gelato and a sandwich. Now that’s a new kind of friend. There’s a fun casualness that I love and adore and often talk about. It’s called, “put up a stage with scaffolding and sound and invite people to come and party”. That’s different than the pristine concert hall with built in tension. We play in the center of the food court with browsing and shopping all around. It’s almost like a city square carnival but all the snacks are different.  And the place is packed like a nightclub…it’s fantastic.

It’s about eight steps up to the stage level and I struggle a bit in plain view of the audience with my team helping me. I sense and feel a bit of a hush and maybe it’s in my mind because I’m so self-conscious, but once I’m on stage and sing my opening lines, it’s run baby run! The band and I are set up really close to each other and we know it and feel it internally. Once again I’m seeing people sing the words right along with me and there are a lot of people who came to hear the music, not to go shopping. And that’s way cool!

I am happy… Let’s go eat some dinner…Long drive tomorrow again!

See you in Venice!

Love,

Al

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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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