Did you know Charlie Parker and Michael Jackson share a birthday? That’s right: Aug. 29. And so the long wave of this summer’s 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 Jackson’s song “I Can’t 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 he’s 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. Bartz’s 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 Bhikha’s Muslim pop song “Give Thanks to Allah.”
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 Jackson’s song “I Can’t 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 he’s 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. Bartz’s 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 Bhikha’s Muslim pop song “Give Thanks to Allah.”
