On Sunday evening, the Kate McGarry Trio performed at the Swedish-American Hall on upper Market Street in San Francisco. McGarry, a vocalist whose sense of jazz is complex, individual and unexpected, was joined onstage by her husband, guitarist Keith Ganz and percussionist Clarence Penn, both terrific musicians.
The concert was part of the 2010 SF Jazz Spring Season, which began on February 19 and ends mid-June. The festival presents a myriad of artists of differing musical persuasions, backgrounds and impulses in 40 different shows in 14 San Francisco venues. The music runs the gamut from the intimacies of a trio to the explosive dynamics of the big band. Keith Jarrett, Charles Lloyd, Ralph Towner, Bobby McFerrin, Salif Keita … I’ll stop. There are too many to list, and any selection is random.
McGarry is described as “part of a new generation” in vocal jazz, and the young Boston native has released five CDs that are eclectic in their musical assemblage, with Irish folk songs, songs by Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Joni Mitchell, Antonio Carlos Jobim and her own compositions. But listing those names or even naming the songs gives you little idea of how McGarry and her musicians perform a song. As she told the audience, describing the group’s interpretation of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-changing,” “We took it apart and put it back together again.”
She is the first singer I’ve heard who can completely extract Joni Mitchell from the songs the Canadian singer wrote with her indelible sound and unmistakable persona. McGarry’s arrangement of “Chelsea Morning” is sleek and bold. And like most of her interpretations based in a sense of meditative speech and rhythmic eccentricities rather than the artifice of melody. The closest she came to upholding a vocal tradition was the Irish folk song she sang while accompanying herself on a sruti box, a small briefcase-like instrument that works like a harmonium and was originally used as a drone in Indian music.
McGarry’s most recent CD release, If Less Is More … Nothing Is Everything, was nominated for a Grammy for Best Vocal Jazz Album of the year. And less is more is a perfect description each musician’s approach to the music, but especially of Penn’s work on percussion. Armed with a tiny synthesizer, his hands, a variety of brushes and a row of chimes that could decorate a Japanese bonsai garden, he snuck in and out of the music with small gestures, glittery taps, soft susurrations across the drum heads and cascades of bell-like tones. Blessed with wit, experience and a sense of mischief, nothing he did seemed predictable but everything fit just right.
I can’t put my finger on why I think Keith Ganz is one fab guitarist. Listing technical skills just doesn’t do the job. All I can say is that it has to do with both the clarity of his playing and his intensity of attack. Again, less is more.
—Jaime Robles
For more information about the SF Jazz Festival, visit sfjazz.org or call the box office at 866-920-5299.