The temperature was supposed to hit a toasty 88 degree at 6 p.m. when the six-week, and 56th annual, Paul Brown Monday Night Jazz concert series would kick off its second week of performances. I arrived at Bushnell Park at 5:30 to secure a coveted spot in the shade. To my surprise, it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared; I even chose to sit beneath the red-orange sun as it waned against the horizon. I overheard nearby jazz fans discussing the cooler temperatures, explaining that some of the smoke from the Canadian wildfires had blown back down, blotting out the sun. I wasn’t sure if I should be thankful or concerned.
The concert was a similarly dissonant evening of music that featured two of the jazz world’s premiere musicians.
The concert opened with the Alden Hellmuth Quintet. Hellmuth is a Hartford native and a graduate of the Hartt School of Music. Her music has focused on blurring the lines between composition and improvisation, integrating the two into a style that deploys atonality and rhythmic freedom. In the piece “Whirl,” Hellmuth sent her saxophone on dizzying runs, anchored by Lucas Kadish on guitar and Kanoah Mendenhall on bass. “Just Like Water” was a more contemplative, melodic piece, featuring a duet between Hellmuth and her longtime friend and collaborator, pianist Yvonne Rogers. The headline tune of the performance was “Good Intentions,” which featured a memorable solo by Mendenhall that earned sustained applause from the audience. The set ended on “Ambrosia,” a short tune that highlighted dueling melodies from Hellmuth and Rogers.
The Alden Helmuth Quintet set the tone for Monday night’s headliner, violinist Terry Jenoure and The Portal (minus cello player Wayne Smith). Jenoure and her collaborators formed The Portal during the first few months of the pandemic lockdowns, and have had success since. They performed a piece titled “Letters From Poppa,” a 90-minute straight set inspired by the letters Jenoure’s grandfather, a Jamaican immigrant, sent to his wife after being detained in Canada while trying to re-enter the United States.
Jenoure is a student of the free jazz movement and it showed in the texture of her compositions. She layered the baseline and undertones of her music with lush accompaniment from Joe Fonda and Avery Sharp on basses, while she arced above the low rumbling with piercing bowing that evoked the stress and uncertainty of her grandfather’s time in detention. Angelica Sanchez’s piano playing alternated between airy highlights and thundering crescendos when the mood called for it.
Most striking was Jenoure’s incorporation of spoken word and song into her performance. Her voice commanded the rest of the sounds, springing forward off Reggie Nicholson’s steady percussion and seizing my imagination. I could picture her grandfather, writing of love and regret and fear, as Jenoure sang with grating urgency. The sounds crashed against each other, and I felt a small taste of the anxiety that her grandfather surely endured.
The evening’s performance embodied the often clashing nature of our time. A brutally hot night, mitigated by the side effects of terrible fires, ended with tender expressions of love elicited by the terror of imprisonment. It gave me a lot to think about.
When they’re playing next: The next event in the Monday Night Jazz series is 07/24 with the Amherst Jazz Orchestra with Ethel Lee and The Makanda Project.
Where I’m going next: The July 19 Speaking Sentences Backwards at Real Art Ways on the 19th.
