Live Performances → Portland 2011 Jazz Fest – Day Two
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After a good nights sleep; my good friend Jeff, a Portland native picked me up at the hotel. The morning was clear so we took a tram ride to check out the view. From the tram you could see Mt. Saint Helens, minus the lid it blew off back in the late 70′s as well as a cool view of snow covered Mt. Hood. Great veiw….very cold. Typically this time of year in Portland at least based on past experience, it’s 50 plus degrees….this particular day it was about 20. The first couple days in town, Portland was setting new marks for low temperatures for this time of year…I thought I had left this behind in Indy but apparently not.
Once back at ground level, we went to check out “Making Music” a jazz photo exhibit by New York based photographer Fran Kaufman. A showing of about 20 images were are being shown at the Oregon Jewish Museum. Keeping with the theme of the festival; this exhibit was a great edition. The primary exhibit on display at this time was that of 20th century composer and photographer Ernest Bloch. Many of his photographs, negatives, original musical scores, letters and personal memorabilia were on display as well, very nice to see.
After a quick lunch, we went to one of the many always interesting roundtable discussions put together by the PDX organizers. This one featured Don Byron, a man with a lot to say as well as Esperanza Spalding, Anat Cohen, her brother Yuval and Oran Etkin, moderated by pianist Darrell Grant. With all on the panel either being African America or Jewish, it was a conversation on the link between the two. We unfortunately missed the discussion with the 3 Cohens, not sure how that happened.
The first of two evening performances that I shot was Portland native and very recent Grammy winner Esperanza Spalding and her Chamber Music Society. Introduced by Anat Cohen, Spalding and her group of great musicians put on a wonderful 90 minute show for a capacity crowd at the Newmark Theater. Not my favorite place to shoot at but I found a nice spot for this particular show and the soon to come images are from that performance. This band featured a 3 piece string section, a second singer, Darrell Grant on piano and Terri Lynn Carrington on drums.
The last set of the day was the Pancho Sanchez “Latin Dance Party” at the Crystal Ballroom, a beautiful old room built as a dance hall, complete with a wooden floor on top of ball bearings that literally bounces when you walk on it. Throw in the great master conquero like Sanchez and hundreds of listeners/dancers and you can only imagine how much the floor moves with the beat. Trying to hand hold a camera at a 30th of a second with the floor bouncing non-stop is not the easiest thing to do.