Jazz — or what people can get away with calling jazz — is crucial to the world of American midsize theaters and subscription performing-arts audiences. So jazz becomes extra dynamic for a week in New York around the time of the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. Besides the panels and performances at the New York Hilton, the conference’s home base, clubs around town set up dozens of showcases last week. The biggest was Winter Jazzfest, which took over the Knitting Factory on Saturday night.
A 7-hour, 19-band evening stretching to 2 a.m., this was actually Part 2 of Winter Jazzfest. The previous weekend, the club had a similar evening of bands for the benefit of those attending the International Association of Jazz Educators conference. But the bill was better the second week, for obvious reasons. The jazz educators’ conference mostly draws students and educators. The arts presenters’ draws more people who hand out gigs and checks.
Saturday’s bill showed just how shifting jazz has become, stretching into funk and soul and old-time country music, big-band blare and quiet duets, free improvisation and precise harmonic science. The strongest sets were by bands who went the furthest afield of a recognizable jazz tradition — no doubt because eclecticism is so crucial to the nonprofit performing arts circuit.
Consider, for instance, the two northern California violinists: Jenny Scheinman (whose roots are there, though she now lives in Brooklyn) and Carla Kihlstedt (who lives in Oakland). Ms. Scheinman played her finely wrought music with a quintet; it was folk-influenced, with a little humor and a strong flavor of Bill Frisell’s through-the-looking-glass Americana.
Ms. Kihlstedt performed with 2 Foot Yard, a trio with the cellist Marika Hughes and the drummer and guitarist Shahzad Ismaily, mixing high musicianship and bright ideas with street-band roughness.
Mr. Ismaily played a standard drum kit with his hands and, at other times, produced vamps on a distressed electric guitar; Ms. Kihlstedt played sweeping violin lines in counterpoint to the cello and sang in a wide spectrum between punk and tenderness. The songs, including an arrangement of the Carter Family tune “50 Miles of Elbow Room,” were unpretentious, gorgeously arranged, witty and spooky.
Other sets pushed singers out to the front of the music. Kellylee Evans and Heidi Martin, both strong vocalists, sang a sort of mentholated, urbane jazz-funk that at this point sounds packaged and patented. (In Ms. Evans’s case, spare arrangements helped.)
And Claudia Acuña, who has been around New York’s jazz scene for 10 years, sang with strength and grace in English and Spanish over a rhythm section of New York jazz musicians, including the bassist Omer Avital and the pianist Jason Lindner.
Those last two also played in the rhythm section of an outstanding band led by Anat Cohen, an Israeli-born clarinetist. She is the sister of Avishai Cohen, a trumpeter, and together the siblings played lines in tight unison over vamps from a bouncing rhythm section. Her tone was clear and woody, without squeaks; the music was joyous and schooled.
What about jazz as we used to know it: jazz harmony, swing, melodies? The trumpeter Steven Bernstein offered postmodernized big-band swing with his Millennial Territory Orchestra; the pianist Robert Glasper played flexibility games with his trio, slipping in and out of rhythm and harmony; and Misja Fitzgerald-Michel, a fast-fingered French guitarist, took his own trio through a super-slow version of John Coltrane’s “Central Park West.” It still exists.
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