Throughout the week, Nublu in Alphabet City has been hosting nightly satellite shows, too. This is a festival that continues to ask what it means to present a music festival — particularly one that aspires to represent an entire, protean genre. And, especially at the marathons, it continues to yield opportunities to be surprised, to test your expectations of buzzy new bands, and even to be usefully let down by artists you considered great.
Speaking of surprises, my biggest of the weekend was Zacchae’us Paul, a pianist and vocalist increasingly known for his work alongside Melanie Charles, and who may soon break out on his own. Backed by a five-piece band, he danced in and out of funk, jazz-rock fusion and a kind of futuristic gospel. His trumpeter, Milena Casado, was a revelation. Then, when the young Baltimore-based trumpeter Brandon Woody sat in, things kicked up two notches further. On the last song in the set, Woody and Casado traded lines, bringing the old idea of a cutting competition forward, riding a rising tide rather than a tête-à-tête.
The biggest affirmation of greatness came not from a jazz musician, but from a poet: Saul Williams, onstage at Nublu late on Friday night, backed only by an electronic musician. “What do we know of history / when all it does is repeat?” he asked the audience. “But we’re not here to repeat / we’re here to break cycles.” There was a roar of hopeful assent from a crowd hungry for a message that could meet this political moment.
If Winter Jazzfest offers an organic read on the many incipient forces driving the music forward, Unity Fest presented more like a cut-and-dried sampler of the known subgenres that nowadays fall under the label of “jazz.”
Representing Latin jazz was Sonido Solar, a youthful ensemble that has been mentored by Eddie Palmieri, and which played an arrangement of his tune “Puerto Rico” in an earnest, salsa-dura style. There was historically rooted free jazz, courtesy of the downtown doyen William Parker and his ensemble, In Order to Survive. There was avant-garde jazz in the mode of mid-1960s John Coltrane, courtesy of Scatter the Atoms That Remain and a frontline of all-star guests (the trumpeter Randy Brecker and the saxophonists Billy Harper and Isaiah Collier).
