A Saturday Groove Special at the Ground Up Music Festival

11 Sunday Feb 2018

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Roosevelt

Roosevelt Collier at the GroundUP Music Festival Saturday. Photo by Luis Olazábal / Rhythm Foundation

Saturday at the second annual GroundUp Music Festival at the North Beach Bandshell on Miami Beach sounded like the day (and evening) of the groove — and the perils of too much of a good thing.

There was, still, diversity. A program that, in the span of a few hours,  includes the horns-and-voices, R&B-rooted sound of Emily Estefan; the Sacred Steel tradition-gone heavy blues/rock/funk of pedal steel wizard Roosevelt Collier and the ferocious live /electronica experimentation of Swiss drummer Jojo Mayer’s Nerve, can hardly be considered homogeneous — and yet. The law of unintended consequences might’ve caught up with the festival.

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GroundUP Music Fest — no borders music and a breeze from the ocean.

10 Saturday Feb 2018

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Snarky Puppy on their opening set at the GroundUP Music Festival at the North Beach Bandshell, Miami Beach, Friday. Michael League center. Photo by Luis Olazábal/Rhythm Foundation

By the time Snarky Puppy finished opening their set, unspooling one of its long, engaging musical tales, full of catchy melodies and various asides and side trips, night had fallen over the North Beach Bandshell on Miami Beach but still, it was 75 degrees, there was a slight breeze from the ocean and palm trees were swaying just so. You can’t blame Michael League, the band’s leader, composer, and bassist for being, let’s call it, uncharitably truthful, as he welcomed the audience to the second annual GroundUp Music Festival in “temperate Miami Beach while all our friends are freezing their asses back in New York.”

And yet, the great setting is only part of the story.

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“Take Five ” — With A Pakistani Swing

28 Saturday Oct 2017

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The Sachal Ensemble performing at a jazz festival © Sachal Studios

Globalization has produced many stories —not all inspiring. But having a Pakistani ensemble become a worldwide sensation by playing Paul Desmond’s immortal “Take Five,” which pianist Dave Brubeck turned into a hit nearly 50 years ago, has to be one of the most delightful — and improbable.

The 10-piece Sachal Ensemble, a group from Lahore, Pakistan, became an unlikely global sensation when the video of their performance of “Take Five,” a peculiar, swinging blend of South Asian classical music and jazz, got a million hits on YouTube. In a letter quoted in a story in Esquire Middle East, Brubeck, who got to hear it before his passing in 2012, wrote to producer Izzat Majeed: “This is the most interesting and different recording of ‘Take Five’ that I’ve ever heard. … Listening to this exotic version brings back wonderful memories of Pakistan where my Quartet played in 1958. East is East, and West is West, but through music the twain meet. Congratulations!”

The album that followed it, Sachal Jazz: Interpretations of Jazz Standards & Bossa Nova, became a best seller that topped the iTunes jazz charts. That led to world tours, appearances at jazz festivals and a celebrated performance with Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center in 2013, captured in Song of Lahore, a from-Lahore-to-New York documentary film by two-time Academy Award-winning director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken.

The Sachal Ensemble is appearing at the Olympia Theater in downtown Miami, Saturday. The concert opens MDC Live’s 2017-2018 season under the banner “Ojala/ Inshallah: Wishes from the Muslim World. ”

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