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Connecting Dots, from Bird to Michael Jackson

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Did you know Charlie Parker and Michael Jackson share a birthday? Thats right: Aug. 29. And so the long wave of this summers Jackson tributes rolled through the annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival on Saturday.

As always, the festival, organized by the City Parks Foundation, happened in two parts Saturday afternoon at Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, Sunday afternoon at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. On Saturday the saxophonist Gary Bartz and his band performed Jacksons song “I Cant Help It", with the young jazz and hip-hop vocalist Bilal giving it a fairly (for him) straight reading.

It was one of the plainer parts of the set. Mr. Bartz is no strict jazz conservationist. Since the early 1970s funk has fed his music and vice versa: his Harlem Bush Music, from 1971, has been a club-D.J. favorite, and more recently hes fallen in with the circle around the hip-hop band the Roots. For the picnicking Harlem crowd he opened his music up wide. His set included rappers (Lord Nez and Akim Kuzma-Bartz, Mr. Bartzs son), two-saxophone improvisations (with Rene McLean) and long drafts of his improvising over a straight-ahead jazz rhythm section, a kind of demonstration of how to connect the lessons of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. And it ended with DJ Brainchild up till then little used in the set playing Zain Bhikhas Muslim pop song Give Thanks to Allah.

With Frank Wess, the days headliner, the strictly-jazz crowd was on firm ground. Mr. Wess, at 87, remains a reliable messenger from another time: his shapely, easy-swinging saxophone solos in medium tempo were models of cool vernacular art. The notes went by softly, but the grammar and style of the solos were hard-boiled 1940s and 50s: authoritatively lagging swing, bop flurries, virile ballad phrases, meaningful resolutions. He was brilliant in extended solos during Johnny Mandels ballad A Time for Love and used the uptempo Billies Bounce as his Parker reference, trading solos with the saxophonist Scott Robinson.

The strongest performances of the day which also included the young saxophonist Benny Reid, playing smooth jazz with occasional lumps belonged to the baritone singer Jos James. Mr. James, in his mid-20s, has made only one record so far, The Dreamer, full of smart, trancelike, mysterious funk. But on Saturday he showed how supremely able he is at a more traditional kind of jazz singing.

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