By CAROLYN BROWN
Staff Writer
In a year of international strife, the Northampton Jazz Festival is aiming to bring people together with music that transcends borders.
The Northampton Jazz Festival, which will return for its 12th year on Sept. 27 and 28, is celebrating the unifying power of jazz with the theme “Jazz Without Borders.” More than 50 musicians who represent countries around the world (including Argentina, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Cuba, Cyprus, India, Israel, Palestine, Pakistan, and the United States) will play free shows at venues throughout downtown Northampton.
The Anat Cohen Quartetinho headlines the Northampton Jazz Festival this year. The band, whose members hail from Israel, Brazil and the United States, will perform at the Academy of Music on Sept. 28 at 7:30 p.m. CONTRIBUTED
The headline performance will be the Anat Cohen Quartetinho at the Academy of Music on Saturday, Sept. 28, at 7:30 p.m. (The show is the only ticketed event in the festival; not including fees, tickets are $35 to $55, $20 for students, or $10 through the Card to Culture program.)
The Anat Cohen Quartetinho, led by the Grammy-nominated clarinetist Anat Cohen, also features pianist and accordionist Vitor Gonçalves, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; bassist Tal Mashiach, from Harashim, Israel; and vibraphonist and percussionist James Shipp, from Columbia, Maryland.
As it happens, this isn’t Cohen’s first time in the Pioneer Valley: in 2008, she was the Billy Taylor Jazz Artist-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and performed there again in 2022 as a guest musician and educator. She also taught and performed earlier this summer at Northampton’s Choro Noho camp.
As a group, the Quartetinho’s musical influences draw from even further than their own national backgrounds; Cohen, who hails from Tel Aviv, Israel, but went to college at Berklee College of Music in Boston, is known for her ability to play jazz of different styles, as well as choro, a genre of instrumental Brazilian music. In a recent interview with Ricard Torres-Mateluna, a member of the Jazz Festival’s board, Cohen said choro “has everything: It has seriousness, because you have to be an instrumentalist, and you must have abilities on the instrument in order to play this music, because its sound is really demanding. You also have to be very expressive and very much in touch with your feelings to be able to have all the nuances of sound to express and make the melody your own.”
Rapidly rising star vocalist Ekep Nkwelle will lead her quartet at 4 p.m. Sept. 28 at the Unitarian Society as part of the Northampton Jazz Festival. CONTRIBUTED
Those skills, Cohen says, transcend genre: “That’s what jazz musicians are after, to find their own voice and sounds to be able to express it,” she told Torres-Mateluna. “In that sense choro and jazz are the same: It’s about the search; take a melody and make it your own.”
By coincidence, the group will be releasing their second album, “Quartetinho: Bloom,” on Sept. 27, the day before their Academy of Music performance; concertgoers will be able to purchase signed copies after the show. A single from the album, “Paco,” is already available to stream. Cohen says the album reflects “a beautiful evolution of the band since we started to play [together].”
Jazz Fest President Ruth Griggs said that Cohen made sense as a headliner because the event needed “someone with star power” who could “fill the Academy.” With Cohen’s multicultural musical style in mind, board members suggested other countries whose music they’d like to hear at the festival, and the international lineup came together.
Beyond that, Griggs said, “The ‘Without Borders’ [theme] is that they’re going to be playing jazz in a way that we haven’t heard before, because their jazz is going to have the influences of so many different cultures, so many different traditions, that really is going to break through any kind of traditional boundaries that we would think about.”
This will also be the first year that the Northampton Jazz Festival will have a headlining act with a female bandleader. Griggs said that women in jazz “tend to be stereotyped as vocalists” or as “folks that don’t understand the music to the degree to which the men do,” but that having Cohen in a headlining spot will promote “strong female leaders in jazz,” which Griggs said aligns with the festival’s values.
Esteban Castro will perform two sets of solo piano at Click Workspace at 11 a.m and 12 p.m., Sept. 28, as part of the Northampton Jazz Festival. Photo by Jati Lindsay
In over a decade, the Jazz Fest has gone through other notable changes as well; in its early years, located in a parking lot behind Thornes, “it was a jazz festival, it was a food festival, it was a cooking contest, it was a beer tent, it was a retro fair — it was too many things, in my opinion, to be successful,” Griggs said. The festival took a hiatus in 2016 and 2017.
In its current form, however, the festival is set up such that guests are able to explore the area and visit local businesses and restaurants rather than stay in one place.
“We want to get people up and out and moving around and interacting and enjoying Northampton,” Griggs said.
Local businesses see a boost in foot traffic from having several thousand people, some from as far away as New Jersey, New York, and Maine, spending time (and money) downtown during the festival; because most of the shows are free, the festival brings a very diverse audience to the city, Griggs said.
More so, though, “The spirit is elevated. People are dancing and having such a wonderful time in Pulaski Park and enjoying running into each other on the street when they’re walking by.”
The free programming on Saturday, Jazz Fest Day, also includes an educational workshop for elementary school children at 11 a.m. at Iron Horse; two solo piano sets by Esteban Castro at 11 a.m and 12 p.m. at Click Workspace; a parade led by the local Expandable Brass Band at 11:45, starting from Click Workspace; a live broadcast of Jack Frisch’s jazz-focused radio show “The Downbeat” at 12:30 p.m. at Pulaski Park; two sets by the Julieta Eugenio Trio, whose bandleader is from Argentina, at the Parlor Room, at 12:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m.; a set by the Ize Trio, whose members come from Cyprus, Palestine, and the United States, at 1 p.m. at the Unitarian Society.
The Arun Ramamurthy Trio will perform at 1:45 p.m. at the Iron Horse on Sept. 28 for the Northampton Jazz Festival. CONTRIBUTED
It will also include a set from the South Indian-influenced Arun Ramamurthy Trio at 1:45 p.m. at the Iron Horse; a set from The Jeff Holmes Big Band, whose bandleader is the director of Jazz & African American Music Studies at UMass Amherst, and vocalist Dawning Holmes at 2:15 p.m. at Pulaski Park; a set from the Ekep Nkwelle Quartet, whose bandleader is Cameroonian-American, at 4 p.m. at the Unitarian Society; and a set from “salsa dura” group Jesús Pagán Y Su Orquestra at 5:15 p.m. at Pulaski Park.
Programming as part of Friday’s Jazz Strut includes sets by students at UMass Amherst and the University of Connecticut, the Fred Clayton Blues Band, Haley Isadora, Steve Bulmer Trio, Evan Arntzen Quartet, and a jam session led by Fumi Tomita. For the full lineup and more information, visit northamptonjazzfest.org.
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.
