A lot of people at the Winter Jazzfest this weekend will be ticking off names on a mental checklist, or filing them away for later. This two-day festival, now in its sixth year, is expressly made for them: the prowlers and perusers, many seeking talent for hire. But tickets are also available to the public, at $25 a night or $30 for both, which gives the Winter Jazzfest another, more fascinating purpose. It is for the moment the only real mainstream jazz festival in New York, and its lineup amounts to a temperature reading of the scene at ground level, where its most vibrant and volatile.
What then does the festivals roster say about jazz at the start of this new decade? Mostly that the aesthetic center of the music has broadened and loosened, yielding to many different strategies of rhythm, harmony and texture. A dozen years ago it might have made sense to call this a cross-genre approach, but that very notion now feels quaint.
When you look at the history of jazz, the pianist Vijay Iyer said recently, everybody who made significant contributions to that music never really saw it as a kind of music. Mr. Iyer, who played the inaugural Winter Jazzfest, is back again with his superb trio, whose Historicity (ACT) was the consensus pick among critics for best jazz album of 2009. Historicity imposes no hierarchies where style is concerned, absorbing protocols from myriad sources. A similar openness illuminates the music of Darcy James Argues Secret Society, an ultramodern big band, and the Claudia Quintet, an improvising chamber group, and, really, most of the others here, from Lionel Loueke, a guitarist from Benin, to the Northern California-raised violinist Jenny Scheinman. Hybridism is the new norm.
What then does the festivals roster say about jazz at the start of this new decade? Mostly that the aesthetic center of the music has broadened and loosened, yielding to many different strategies of rhythm, harmony and texture. A dozen years ago it might have made sense to call this a cross-genre approach, but that very notion now feels quaint.
When you look at the history of jazz, the pianist Vijay Iyer said recently, everybody who made significant contributions to that music never really saw it as a kind of music. Mr. Iyer, who played the inaugural Winter Jazzfest, is back again with his superb trio, whose Historicity (ACT) was the consensus pick among critics for best jazz album of 2009. Historicity imposes no hierarchies where style is concerned, absorbing protocols from myriad sources. A similar openness illuminates the music of Darcy James Argues Secret Society, an ultramodern big band, and the Claudia Quintet, an improvising chamber group, and, really, most of the others here, from Lionel Loueke, a guitarist from Benin, to the Northern California-raised violinist Jenny Scheinman. Hybridism is the new norm.
