According to EC's website, he will play on August 3. EC played the Newport Folk Festival in 2005, 2011, and 2016, but this will be his first appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival.
Elvis plays Newport Jazz Festival, August 3, 2024
-
And No Coffee Table
- Posts: 3560
- Joined: Thu Aug 21, 2003 2:57 pm
Elvis plays Newport Jazz Festival, August 3, 2024
https://newportjazz.org/lineup
According to EC's website, he will play on August 3. EC played the Newport Folk Festival in 2005, 2011, and 2016, but this will be his first appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival.
According to EC's website, he will play on August 3. EC played the Newport Folk Festival in 2005, 2011, and 2016, but this will be his first appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival.
-
sweetest punch
- Posts: 6031
- Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
- Location: Belgium
Re: Elvis plays Newport Jazz Festival, August 3, 2024
https://www.facebook.com/ElvisCostello/?locale=nl_BE
Elvis Costello is pleased to announce that he will be joined on-stage at the Newport Jazz Festival by an all-star line-up consisting of bassist Endea Owens, pianist Steve Nieve, Michael Leonhart on trumpet, saxophonist Donny McCaslin, and Raymond James Mason on trombone.
Elvis Costello is pleased to announce that he will be joined on-stage at the Newport Jazz Festival by an all-star line-up consisting of bassist Endea Owens, pianist Steve Nieve, Michael Leonhart on trumpet, saxophonist Donny McCaslin, and Raymond James Mason on trombone.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
-
And No Coffee Table
- Posts: 3560
- Joined: Thu Aug 21, 2003 2:57 pm
Re: Elvis plays Newport Jazz Festival, August 3, 2024
Fearless: A Conversation with Donny McCaslin on David Bowie, Elvis Costello, and the Newport Jazz Festival
PG: This year, you are playing at Newport with Elvis Costello. How did you get hooked up with him?
DM: I think it was through Michael Leonhart. I play in Michael’s band, and at one point a few years ago, Elvis came and sat in with us on a gig. Michael and Elvis also wrote a song together for one of Michael’s records. I’m not quite sure how they met each other. But Michael called me one day and said, “Hey, Elvis wants us to do some gigs with him.” And that’s how it started. So, it all came through my relationship with Michael, but I know that Elvis was also aware of Blackstar.
PG: Elvis has played at the Newport Folk Festival several times, but this is his first time at the Jazz Festival. He’s married to Diana Krall and is surrounding himself for this performance with yourself, Michael, and Endea Owens; people from a jazz background. But most people would not necessarily think of him as making “jazz” music. Where do you feel your set with him will fit within the general umbrella of “jazz”?
DM: Elvis is such a prodigious writer. And, as you probably know, throughout his career, he’s made so many different kinds of music. His musical scope is big. There’s a lot of diversity in his discography and his musical interests. There is one album by him that had Lee Konitz on a track [“Someone Took the Words Away” on North (Deutsche Grammophon, 2003)]. There are songs on that album with an American songbook vibe influence to them. I think the music’s going to fit in wonderfully at the Newport Jazz Festival because his taste in music and his output are eclectic.
Elvis also has an improviser’s vibe on stage. He fully goes for it. He has that spirit of being in the moment and just rolling with it. He will bounce things off the horn section. There’s a real malleability to his artistic viewpoint, which I dig. To me, that is coming from an improviser’s viewpoint, and I greatly enjoy that about him. From the different concerts I’ve done with him, it’s clear he’s unafraid to take chances.
PG: Since he is open to risks, how much freedom does he give you in terms of crafting your own part?
DM: Of course, we have parts when we’re playing as a section. But there’s also room for improvising. How much space there is for improvisation varies from show to show, partly due to the set list and partly due to how Elvis is feeling at the moment. But there is space for improvising.
PG: And in terms of the setlist, when you are playing with this group, is it mostly new songs or rearrangements of Elvis’ older tunes?
DM: Elvis doesn’t want his show to be like a greatest hits collection. He’s constantly rearranging the set order, adding and removing different songs. He goes through these different, musical journeys that represent what his career has been, which is not just pigeonholed into one thing.
And that also takes a real fearlessness on his part. I’m sure some people want to hear only the hits instead of something he wrote with Burt Bacharach or The Roots, as examples. Every night, he puts a lot of thought into his setlist. I find it so inspiring, especially at this point in his career, that he’s still searching for the right combination of elements. He’s still writing. He’s still doing new things.
PG: You mentioned Blackstar a little earlier. Was your experience working with David Bowie similar to working with Elvis?
DM: Well, I think what’s most different was the overall setup. With David, everything we did was in the studio. We went track by track and layered things together. It was my band playing with him. There was this real sense of a common musical conversation between the four of us, five if you count Ben Monder. There was a lot of back and forth in the moment, and Bowie stepped into that and amplified it with his great energy, focus, and his fabulous songs. But the dynamics stayed the same, in a sense, between us playing off each other constantly.
I think what’s different with Elvis is that I’m part of the horn section of his band – with Michael and Ray Mason- instead of my own featuring him. And that is inherently a different general setup of how things go. We are also playing live instead of crafting a song in the studio, doing four takes, and then moving on to the next song. So it’s a different dynamic in that sense.
But I do feel there is a similarity between the two experiences. As I mentioned earlier, Elvis is totally willing to go for it in the moment, and David was the same way. I remember David saying to us the first day we were in the studio making Blackstar that he wanted me to feel free to go for whatever I was hearing and not worry about how it might be labeled or how somebody might categorize the music. Just go for whatever I was hearing. You can’t ask for a more conducive environment to creativity than that. It was a total green light to follow my intuition, which I greatly appreciated. I feel like in those moments with Elvis, when we’re improvising there’s that similar energy. He too just wants me to go for it and is egging me on.
And in terms of Elvis’ setlist selections, I felt that same aesthetic with Bowie that I do with Elvis. When we worked with David, he was in his late 60s. He still wanted to do something very different and dared to do that. He easily could have just done fifteen different versions of “Life on Mars?” and certain people would be happy with that. But, of course, he would never do that.
PG: In fact, when you were working with Bowie, you started listening to his older music to get inspiration for what ended up becoming Blackstar, and he told you not to.
DM: Yeah, yeah. David said he was into something different when we were working together. I took him at his word and stopped listening to his earlier stuff because he wanted to hear what we were bringing to his new music with our own musical language. He had no interest in redoing something that he had already done.
PG: At a base level, both Costello and Bowie are/were vocalists. Your album, Blow. (Motéma, 2018), also emphasized vocalists. Do you feel that through your experiences working with Bowie and on Blow., you picked up anything to help with playing behind Elvis now?
DM: Oh, absolutely. It all feeds into the next thing. Blackstar was the blueprint for me to meld these worlds of improvising, songwriting, supporting vocals, and finding my own voice within that. That absolutely comes into play when working with Elvis.
When I was in the studio with David, I remember playing the song “Lazarus” with him and looking at him singing as I played in my saxophone booth. I closed my eyes, listened to him, and imagined my saxophone was a soft pillow around his voice. My part, whatever I was doing with the notes or the movements, was to be a supportive thing around what I felt was lead. That aesthetic is also something that I think about with Elvis, for sure. Especially on a softer song. We play a lot of softer songs with Elvis like “Someone took the Words Away.” I think about that vibe as well.
Of course, coming up in the jazz tradition, as you can imagine, I did have significant prior experience playing with singers. I recorded a little with Luciana Souza, Kate McGarry, and others. So, it’s not like I had no experience playing with vocalists before David. But it’s obviously different in this sort of hybrid rock-jazz space I’ve been in with both David and Elvis, as well as on Blow..
PG: This year, you are playing at Newport with Elvis Costello. How did you get hooked up with him?
DM: I think it was through Michael Leonhart. I play in Michael’s band, and at one point a few years ago, Elvis came and sat in with us on a gig. Michael and Elvis also wrote a song together for one of Michael’s records. I’m not quite sure how they met each other. But Michael called me one day and said, “Hey, Elvis wants us to do some gigs with him.” And that’s how it started. So, it all came through my relationship with Michael, but I know that Elvis was also aware of Blackstar.
PG: Elvis has played at the Newport Folk Festival several times, but this is his first time at the Jazz Festival. He’s married to Diana Krall and is surrounding himself for this performance with yourself, Michael, and Endea Owens; people from a jazz background. But most people would not necessarily think of him as making “jazz” music. Where do you feel your set with him will fit within the general umbrella of “jazz”?
DM: Elvis is such a prodigious writer. And, as you probably know, throughout his career, he’s made so many different kinds of music. His musical scope is big. There’s a lot of diversity in his discography and his musical interests. There is one album by him that had Lee Konitz on a track [“Someone Took the Words Away” on North (Deutsche Grammophon, 2003)]. There are songs on that album with an American songbook vibe influence to them. I think the music’s going to fit in wonderfully at the Newport Jazz Festival because his taste in music and his output are eclectic.
Elvis also has an improviser’s vibe on stage. He fully goes for it. He has that spirit of being in the moment and just rolling with it. He will bounce things off the horn section. There’s a real malleability to his artistic viewpoint, which I dig. To me, that is coming from an improviser’s viewpoint, and I greatly enjoy that about him. From the different concerts I’ve done with him, it’s clear he’s unafraid to take chances.
PG: Since he is open to risks, how much freedom does he give you in terms of crafting your own part?
DM: Of course, we have parts when we’re playing as a section. But there’s also room for improvising. How much space there is for improvisation varies from show to show, partly due to the set list and partly due to how Elvis is feeling at the moment. But there is space for improvising.
PG: And in terms of the setlist, when you are playing with this group, is it mostly new songs or rearrangements of Elvis’ older tunes?
DM: Elvis doesn’t want his show to be like a greatest hits collection. He’s constantly rearranging the set order, adding and removing different songs. He goes through these different, musical journeys that represent what his career has been, which is not just pigeonholed into one thing.
And that also takes a real fearlessness on his part. I’m sure some people want to hear only the hits instead of something he wrote with Burt Bacharach or The Roots, as examples. Every night, he puts a lot of thought into his setlist. I find it so inspiring, especially at this point in his career, that he’s still searching for the right combination of elements. He’s still writing. He’s still doing new things.
PG: You mentioned Blackstar a little earlier. Was your experience working with David Bowie similar to working with Elvis?
DM: Well, I think what’s most different was the overall setup. With David, everything we did was in the studio. We went track by track and layered things together. It was my band playing with him. There was this real sense of a common musical conversation between the four of us, five if you count Ben Monder. There was a lot of back and forth in the moment, and Bowie stepped into that and amplified it with his great energy, focus, and his fabulous songs. But the dynamics stayed the same, in a sense, between us playing off each other constantly.
I think what’s different with Elvis is that I’m part of the horn section of his band – with Michael and Ray Mason- instead of my own featuring him. And that is inherently a different general setup of how things go. We are also playing live instead of crafting a song in the studio, doing four takes, and then moving on to the next song. So it’s a different dynamic in that sense.
But I do feel there is a similarity between the two experiences. As I mentioned earlier, Elvis is totally willing to go for it in the moment, and David was the same way. I remember David saying to us the first day we were in the studio making Blackstar that he wanted me to feel free to go for whatever I was hearing and not worry about how it might be labeled or how somebody might categorize the music. Just go for whatever I was hearing. You can’t ask for a more conducive environment to creativity than that. It was a total green light to follow my intuition, which I greatly appreciated. I feel like in those moments with Elvis, when we’re improvising there’s that similar energy. He too just wants me to go for it and is egging me on.
And in terms of Elvis’ setlist selections, I felt that same aesthetic with Bowie that I do with Elvis. When we worked with David, he was in his late 60s. He still wanted to do something very different and dared to do that. He easily could have just done fifteen different versions of “Life on Mars?” and certain people would be happy with that. But, of course, he would never do that.
PG: In fact, when you were working with Bowie, you started listening to his older music to get inspiration for what ended up becoming Blackstar, and he told you not to.
DM: Yeah, yeah. David said he was into something different when we were working together. I took him at his word and stopped listening to his earlier stuff because he wanted to hear what we were bringing to his new music with our own musical language. He had no interest in redoing something that he had already done.
PG: At a base level, both Costello and Bowie are/were vocalists. Your album, Blow. (Motéma, 2018), also emphasized vocalists. Do you feel that through your experiences working with Bowie and on Blow., you picked up anything to help with playing behind Elvis now?
DM: Oh, absolutely. It all feeds into the next thing. Blackstar was the blueprint for me to meld these worlds of improvising, songwriting, supporting vocals, and finding my own voice within that. That absolutely comes into play when working with Elvis.
When I was in the studio with David, I remember playing the song “Lazarus” with him and looking at him singing as I played in my saxophone booth. I closed my eyes, listened to him, and imagined my saxophone was a soft pillow around his voice. My part, whatever I was doing with the notes or the movements, was to be a supportive thing around what I felt was lead. That aesthetic is also something that I think about with Elvis, for sure. Especially on a softer song. We play a lot of softer songs with Elvis like “Someone took the Words Away.” I think about that vibe as well.
Of course, coming up in the jazz tradition, as you can imagine, I did have significant prior experience playing with singers. I recorded a little with Luciana Souza, Kate McGarry, and others. So, it’s not like I had no experience playing with vocalists before David. But it’s obviously different in this sort of hybrid rock-jazz space I’ve been in with both David and Elvis, as well as on Blow..