A 2025 Winter Jazzfest Odyssey

Every year, the KMHD staff makes its annual pilgrimage to New York City at arguably the coldest, darkest, and least tourist-friendly time of the year. What brings us here? New York’s Annual (now in its 21st year) Winter Jazz Festival is a place where receptive, knowledgeable, and familiar audiences witness what’s happening now in the east-coast (and to some degree - worldwide) jazz scene. We’re not just there to witness what’s next, but to preach the gospel of our own brand - Jazz Without Boundaries to a new and interested audience. At the same time, the team gains valuable inspiration to bring back to our hometown of Portland, Oregon. What follows are the insights and experiences of our newest staff member, writer Anthony Dean-Harris.

-Matt Fleeger, Program Director

Surprises and White Whales and Near Misses

Culture is. It’s all the things that make up an environment. It can be conceptually changed or directed by a sense of singular perspective but culture literally is all of the elements that make it up. This was one of the things that was running through my mind on the second day of the 2025 New York Winter Jazz Festival as this year’s artist-in-residence Makaya McCraven was giving an interview with Leo Sidrian in a far off tucked away hotel suite. He spoke about the things he was able to accomplish in Amherst and Chicago, what the energy of the people around him made and what he was able to craft from the elements, to reshape moments made from sampling what a band makes on stage without having to worry about those pesky copyrights from sampling the work of others. It’s the spontaneous culture of jazz using the technological approach and culture of hip hop. Spontaneity off the back of a composition has always been my ideal approach to things.

You can send me emails; I can look at fliers on websites; we can have meetings for weeks on end to discuss who we want to see all the livelong day; when it comes to understanding how a festival runs, it’s never going to truly make sense to me until I have a program with a grid schedule and some maps and some letters and sponsor ads and other content physically in my hands. I’m going to need to get up early and walk around to where I’m supposed to be and understand my position on Earth and how far away I am from all the other stuff I’m missing elsewhere. I don’t know where any of this stuff is. The last time I was on this island was almost ten years ago, and I was on the other side of it. I know that I was assigned stage announcements at a few clubs and I’d figure out how I’d get there through the magic of my phone and an element of teamwork. My usual position on a work trip is to focus specifically on the tasks at hand and little else because it’s at least a preset agenda I don’t have to determine (or figure out how to pay for). It’s part of why I went into music journalism, I don’t quite know how to attend a show without a notepad and I have never paid to attend a music festival. I’m glad I was assigned to Greenwich Village’s Le Poisson Rouge for stage announcements on the first day, Thursday, and the same venue on Friday for the Manhattan Marathon while the other half of the KMHD crew were an 11 minute rideshare/33 minute walk away at Nublu in Alphabet City. I got to see this year’s Next Jazz Legacy group, directed by Terri Lyne Carrington as a hub for women & non-binary performers to create music in this scene together. Friend of the station saxophonist Nicole McCabe was among this supergroup. I was already familiar with vocalist Christie Dashiell from her work on Brent Birckhead’s smoothly excellent album Cacao of last year. Her work alongside vocalist Amyra Leon in this group stops folks in their tracks. They turn heads. They have fans and you should be among them. Actress Rosario Dawson is, as she was already a friend of Leon and snagged some KMHD stickers while hanging with the band backstage after the show.

LPR was also the venue that would have pianist/keyboardist Kiefer, someone I had been wanting to see for some time, and later Makaya McCraven in one of his numerous performances throughout the week. Each show would have the artist-in-residence perform with a different band; the Manhattan Marathon show would be the Chicago group of bassist Junius Paul, guitarist Matt Gold, trumpeter Marquis Hill, and saxophonist Josh Johnson. This is essentially half of the lineup from the landmark album that got McCraven the world’s attention – 2015’s In the Moment – for which the festival was celebrating its 10 year anniversary. While it seems inherently absurd to feel like one could miss seeing him despite having five performances over the course of the week, it still felt important to see McCraven at this show relatively early in the festival. Having seen him earlier that day during the talk at the hotel media suite and briefly falling into a conversation or at least a linger alongside Bryson, Meg, Nicole, and some others of us while delivering a bag of KMHD swag, the group of us were already starting to imprint on him as a hang and it fell to me to introduce him on stage that evening. It also fell to me to thank them at the end and talk up the upcoming act after the break, a task that felt fumbled after the extended (re: went long) burner of a set.

Kiefer’s performance alongside bassist Cameron Thistle and drummer Brian Richburg, Jr. was sparkling and beautiful, as expected. He stuck to the piano primarily through his set which was a surprise but also something to appreciate when one encounters a tuned piano in a music festival. They’re rarer than one might expect sometimes, even for something as important as WJF. The added projected graphics from Hessed Porras also gave the performance an extra whimsical punch (especially his take on the Playstation 2’s home screen) in addition to some rather needed visual variation to the festival branding on the back wall, even if that shade of pink is really sick. The whole set had a playful but heavy vibe that hit, particularly the cover of Sade’s “Stronger Than Pride” that was less a surprise reveal but more of a growing embrace. It all made for the kind of total experience, bringing the lofty craftsmanship of music making but giving it a simple joyfulness to it that’s that level up in person from what’s already brilliantly conveyed recorded.

But it was those moments I never saw coming like hearing Guadeloupe native harpist & vocalist Sophye Soliveau and her trio of bassist Eric Turpaud and drummer Florian Mensah work over arrangements of a tune backstage on the opening Thursday night at LPR in an almost meditative vibing out that was almost too sacred to witness and a microcosm of what they brought to the stage. The simple jazz and R&B grooves these three could produce and the power and control of Soliveau’s voice made her one of those performers that one makes a point to remember.

Saxophonist Tomoki Sanders met everyone’s high expectations with their exceptional band late Friday night as a digestif to a full Friday night, thrilling and delighting with their own concept one could clearly see was cooking and simmering with their work over the years as a side player with Kassa Overall. Also, their set came complete with the almost expected bounding from the stage through the crowd, around the venue, and back to the stage again. It’s a burst of energy at any hour but especially at around 2:30 in the morning.

It’s hard to say who on stage had the best stage banter throughout the week. Arooj Aftab was near the top of that list, owning her ground and all the directions she took, whether calmly or stridently, with a constant but casual firmness. It’s a mix of images -- the sunglasses, the patterned coat, the glass of wine on the side -- with the floating lilt even through the turbulent skies that gives the whole performance additional delight. She kept that same energy a couple weeks later here in Portland at a sold out show in our own Brooklyn at the Aladdin Theater with a different configuration of band but that same sense of cool.

Perhaps it was Ganavya with her sprawling tales of contextualization setting the listener at ease and flowing in as easily as all her tunes; though her father, a fixture at the majority of her shows, may also be a jovial but feisty contender as well. However, her control of a crowd and the reverence her aura seems to bring is one of those things to witness and feel strengthened by the energy spread through the attendance. When she sings, everything stops as if one were living in a musical and one should look out for backing support from chirping insects and crooning woodland creatures adding meditative chanting.

Or perhaps banter isn’t quite the right measurement for these performances, because banter is just one aspect of stage presence. Zacchea’us Paul’s ensemble, Jazz Money, certainly had presence at the end of the Saturday night Brooklyn Marathon at the far off Xanadu Roller Arts, filling the expansive stage stretching the length of the sticky skating rink converted into a psychedelic dance floor. His was one of the booming, sweeping, immersive surprises of the week, especially to avoid being overwhelmed by such an enveloping space.

That evening - which included a DJ set from Kieren Hebden, aka Four Tet – was put together by the legendary DJ and presenter Gilles Peterson. His touches were all throughout the festival from that far off magical night across the street from a spot with the best tacos I’ve had since I left Texas. He put together a listening session for Emma-Jean Thackray’s new album in the Ojas Listening Room– a tucked away space in the back of a furniture store with the best speaker system I’ve ever experienced, sonically or visually, before I had to rush off to announce a show. We passed each other at shows or I’ve briskly passed by him in our hotel lobby on the way out to some aimless wandering instead of landing in some conversation like Meg did at some point that week while riding an elevator.

These bustling glances and near misses would happen here and there like passing by Kassa Overall and his new baby in a hallway, or very quickly dapping up keyboardist Jason Lindner, or seeing Ambrose Akinmusire in the back row of the Nublu stage taking in a show. Everything was there made manifest and I was just one person finally trying to take it all in.

The Role

There are multiple reasons why we as a station go to New York for this festival, what has become over its twenty years of permutations and maturations the premiere festival in North America for contemporary jazz music. I’ve still got my white whales that I want to see one day -- Newport Jazz Fest is a legend, I’m hearing rumbles about Big Ears, I haven’t been to Montreal in about as long since I’d been to New York -- but Winter Jazzfest was always that buzz of an event of legend I had heard about but always missed, the time of year when everyone I had admired and covered from afar was all in the same place. To some degree, this proved itself to be true, an event so immense that it was everything I imagined it to be while being limited to my one corporeal form. As a Texan and frequent attendee of the South By SouthWest festival (as well as unofficial day party booker for ten years), I was very familiar with the expression related to the collection of music, film, comedy, education, and tech festivals that fills every nook and cranny of Austin-- any time you’re seeing something, you’re missing something. There’s simply too much going on to feel like one has seen everything, and accepting that you’re missing something elsewhere brings about a kind of calm. We are limited in form and that’s okay. I still have never seen bassist Linda May Han Oh perform live (but perhaps I will when she comes through Portland with Vijay Iyer in February); I was seeing Kneebody at the time, and up until that Saturday, I hadn’t seen them ever before, either.

We as a team go to represent Portland as a force in the scene. We go to spread the word of the best radio station in the world. We go to connect with folks we’ve known over the years and reconnect with them again, to find new things to share with you that we think would be cool, to share experiences that tie us as a team together to make us sound better on the air for you. We also go to do on stage what we do on the air-- put the music in a context for the audience and get out of the way. Every KMHD DJ at some point of the nine days in New York had to make stage announcements introducing performers as they went on, encapsulating the on air experience except with all the attentive faces with all those loving ears actually in the room with us. Compared to year’s past, it added an extra layer to our access, making us a part of making this happen and connecting us to the experience all the attendees were having. We’re connective tissue, crucial cartilage to the body of the show, one of those elements that when part of the collective and working like every other part at its peak makes for a great show, but with the knowledge that any element out of place takes from the completion of the experience itself. It’s a responsibility we don’t take lightly.

We go as a team because we’re all playing to our strengths and covering different corners. We go so the East Coast can hear a Bryson Wallace or Rev Shines DJ set at Nublu. We go so Derek Smith can play a set at the opening week of the East Village’s Funny Bar because it’s the latest endeavor of the same guy who owns Baby’s All Right in Williamsburg. We go so Meg Samples can hit up saxophonist Nicole McCabe and fall into familiarity and comfort in the midst of befuddlement at the foot of the cozy, secure labyrinth of a SoHo hotel. It was to shop through a different bunch of record stores. There’s so much to see and do and accomplish and so much ground to cover that it helps to have every member of the team with our various experiences and perspectives to represent all that KMHD is for this leviathan event.

On the Inherent Nature of a Work

One of the main points of a convention is the mixing of folks who don’t often run into each other. Of the two times I’ve been to New York, there have been only three constants who I have encountered-- percussionist Joe Dyson (performing at this festival with Isaiah Collier & the Chosen Few, and whose work with Chief Adjuah almost a decade ago still rattles around in my brain), percussionist/producer Amaury “KingKlavé” Acosta (an institution in the New York streets so stolid, he truly belongs everywhere he roams), and writer Kyla Marshell. Kyla and I have been friends for some twenty years now -- both of us coming up in the Atlanta University Center together with my English degree from Morehouse College class of 2008 and she with her English degree from the Spelman College class of 2009. I found my way in the jazz circles through Texas radio waves and the jazz blogosphere of the Aughts and 2010s as Kyla moved through various poetry and literary circles in New York while also finding her way into various publications including some work at WBGO Newark and some other help with Winter Jazzfest. Coming to town, I knew it would be a delight to reconnect again and see how we both are doing, especially with my new move to Portland making this trip to New York possible. Seeing her at Greenwich Village’s Le Poisson Rouge that opening Thursday night brought back all those same thoughts we had about writers and their work, about being creative and finding the best ways to do so. Kyla has always fundamentally posed herself as a writer. This is her root, despite all the other turns life has taken her, which is typical for life as a writer. All the things we do are experiences that shape our perspectives that we later encapsulate into words.

We stood in the back of LPR watching aja monet dazzle the crowd in a role not typically seen, particularly contemporaneously-- the poet bandleader. monet’s band is top notch-- saxophonist Marcus Strickland has always found a particular kind of pocket that knows all the right places to shine; bassist Ben Williams, whose own project was one of the favorite performances of a good deal of the KMHD staff at his Friday performance at Nublu during the Manhattan Marathon; keyboardist Javier Santiago, a west coaster who I’ve admired for the last half decade and think about his approach to the keys today the same way I’d think Joe Sample would look at the scene were he around today (and Sample didn’t also play trumpet); and drummer Justin Brown, the likely MVP of the festival by sheer gargantuan amount of appearances (at least four, not including an album recording later he did on the side and rehearsals for a show with Yoko Kanno) and performances he made throughout the week. I have made a running joke for years, shouting it at shows ages ago, that Justin Brown is a muuuuuuurrrrrrrrddddddeeeeeerrrrrreeeeeeeeerrrrrrr-- a murderer of drum kits. Find him in those times when he’s letting loose at end of a tune, the solos that turn into breakdowns, when he goes hard for an unholy amount, but somehow perfect amount, of bars. However, judging from how often the immensely prolific knower of the vibe (and seemingly every possible one for every possible one at that) was performing day and night throughout the week, it would seem Justin Brown is a murderer of sleep. In the midst of all these guys playing at the top of their game, aja monet has directed this pocket and beams in the spotlight she points there. The performance is as part of it as the words themselves.

Kyla and I talked about this project, and how it took time to craft to become what we were seeing before us. She thought of her own work as a writer and wondered about how she should present it, perhaps not necessarily as monet has, but maybe something along those lines. The blank page is hard enough, but playing with time and space beyond that has always been a different, more daunting challenge. I thought about my own exploits and those of the folks I hung out with in San Antonio before I moved. I thought about how artists have a concept in mind about how best it should be expressed, how an idea has a certain form and certain medium at its core. As a person who works as a writer and an essayist but who has worked as a muralist in text-based multimedia art before, it makes sense to me to say “these words should be presented in this fashion”, and every time that different challenge of medium presented itself, I did a certain degree of freaking out more than my usual punch-drunkenness at the challenge of mere words do for me when the time is right. But there’s always the challenge of the next words. I thought about saxophonist Julieta Eugenio’s album of last year, Stay, where she wrote and performed all the music, wrote poems to accompany the songs, and painted the painting for the cover art. When working in multiple media, for the artist, a work will know what it needs to be and how it should get there. I know Kyla will figure out eventually what her next words will be, in what form and what expression.

I saw Justin Brown again late Tuesday night in a Williamsburg studio recording session with bassist Joe Sanders and saxophonist Logan Richardson. The trio recorded a set of songs, finding a groove and riding the energy of a week of constant creativity. New York is New York and everyone assembled in that cauldron of the ambitious, but there’s just something about everyone coming to town for WJF. The West Coasters are here. The French are here. Magic is happening and it’s possible to capture a moment when all the elements are right. All the aforementioned parties alongside KMHD program director Matt Fleeger ran into Bridge Studio co-owner Mona Kahyan and found the open night on their schedule to be the perfect time for a recording with a bundle of the KMHD folks on hand to help document the endeavor and bear witness to the creative process without getting in the way. After a relatively brisk three hour session, Richardson, tired but satisfied with the music the three made, prepared to leave, knowing he’d revisit the recording later with a clearer mind. We spoke about what will come of it, of what form it should be, how to present it. Perhaps it should be restructured. Perhaps it should be reordered. Perhaps it’s perfect. At the moment, it was 1:30 a.m. and there probably wasn’t a full night’s sleep slept compiled between the three of them by that point of the week, so the sober editorial mind would have to come later. The work would reveal itself as what it was meant to be later, but to be in the room while the trio searched and find it -- the rhythms, the runs, the bold tunes and the ballad that could only arise past midnight and finds that part of the soul that wrenches out every drop when it was tired enough to let it all go -- was a blessing I’m only glad to call it only semi-ephemeral in the future present tense, a work still finding its form as it’s molded in the artists' hands before it makes its way to us.

The People In Our Phones

The nature of art is loaded intention transmitted from the artist to the audience through the work. The means and contextualization of the transmission of the art frames that work, and hopefully the artist’s intention, for the audience. This is the role of the broadcaster, the curator, the disc jockey as well as the critic, however these roles are also still variations of the audience that still ultimately receives and interprets the artist’s work. In our modern age due to the consumption of so much of this work in our digital devices, we hazard flattening our conceptualization of the work and the artists who make it. It’s helpful to remember the humanity of the people who touch us through art, particularly at times when that humanity makes moments surreal.

The trip was a week of instances where all the people in my phone, folks who I had kept in discourse or discussed from afar, were all in one physical place. All of the theory was being put into practice and I was carefully thinking about all the words whether positive or disparaging I’ve said over my last decade and a half career that I could have written about the people baring their hearts and souls into their instruments for my amusement and scrutiny.

Of the highlight shows I knew I wanted to see that evening, my bucket list show of Kneebody was earlier in the evening and I was rapt with attention the entire show. The quartet of saxophonist Ben Wendel, trumpeter Shane Endsley, keyboardist Adam Benjamin, and bassist & drummer Nate Wood were everything I was dreaming of hearing for the over dozen years of my covering them in my career. The group was one of those bands I’ve admired from afar and had on my list of hoping to see someday. I also hadn’t seen the Sun Ra Arkestra in my life by that point, either, but Kneebody always seemed somehow more in reach. Their tight set filled with songs from their last album, Chapters, and a few from their upcoming new album conveyed everything I’ve always known about this group who have played together for over two decades. Seeing them at work was even more fulfilling than the honor of introducing them to the crowd, even when I later learned a follower of my work for many years was surprised to find me there on that stage and snapped a quick photo. The layers of the parasocial interactions were just another curiosity of the moment.

Bryson prepared for hours to introduce the Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen to the Brooklyn Bowl stage of the Saturday night Brooklyn Marathon. The chain of us DJs as presenters for each show made loose sense, but really only made a connecting thread if one were present at the venue long enough to notice so specific a detail, something rather counterintuitive to the multi-venue marathon format. It would make sense to have someone introduce the performer to the audience in any normal occasion, but when it comes to the workings of interstellar travelers, one ultimately should stay out of their way. The Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen is a group that needs no introduction, as they saw fit to begin with great grandiloquence, leaving Bryson anxiously crestfallen with all the energy of that preparation left with nowhere to go. The rest of us took advantage of the other aspect of this famed venue and bowled during the show. As a team building exercise, I learned my boss, much like myself, is a committer to bits-- we were literally cosmic bowling. In the midst of my body just as quickly learning as it did forgetting how to bowl, I was astounded at the reality of the situation-- the most important band in Afrofuturism and a still ongoing pillar of the jazz canon was performing behind me and I was off to the side bowling. At some point, both Matt and I realized I should break off for a bit and watch the show.

There is nothing quite like the pomp and grandiosity of the Arkestra, nothing that holds equal measures of the esteem one holds for one’s elders (especially one’s Black elders who have endured unimaginable obstacles to reach this point) and nigh-incredulous admiration for a collective of folks straight up going for it. The robes and dashikis of sparkling gold and silver is just the start of the ostentatiousness, because then comes the swirling nature of the arrangements, the barrage of sound that still lands on melody. There’s a clarion call of harmony in the midst of the cacophony, and some of those harmonies are jazz standards in themselves as recognizable as any other tune from the Great American Songbook. To the uninitiated, it’s a confusing bit of a lot but it’s done so completely and compellingly, especially when they leave the stage to make a procession throughout the venue, that it’s impossible not to get swept up into it all.

By the time the ebullient guitarist Pedro Martins hit the stage to close the evening melding one more soundcheck with the start of his performance, ultimately taking the stage announcements duty from Bryson again like Lucy taking Charlie Brown’s football, as beautifully sweeping as Martins' performance was, it was just too much of a good thing for a long night of magnificence.

In the background of all of this, Los Angeles is on fire at the time. It was a rather inescapable thought while the blustery cold of New York and the barrage of gigs laid before us, for many of the folks performing this week, they had much more pressing affairs on the other side of the country. Before their Saturday night Brooklyn Marathon performance at the Music Hall of Williamsburg with SML, bassist Anna Butterss noted that amongst the five of them in the group, they know at least 20 people at that time whose houses had burned down. They all then commenced with a 50 minute unceasing set of synth focused full improvisation where they found exactly where they were going and trusted each other as much as they trusted us all to follow them. Booker Stardrum’s drumming is propulsive, springy, and unrelenting. Josh Joshson whispers as well as he bellows on the saxophone and matches the energy here impeccably. Gregory Uhlmann has an elegant touch on the guitar that holds like the skin to Stardrum’s bones, with Butterss bass as the muscle, Johnson’s sax as the breath, and Jeremiah Chiu’s synth’s as the blood to wrap up this metaphor of the body. However this body of SML feels forceful, like it could become dance itself. It begged more movement than it wrought.

All throughout the festival, we saw word of folks like saxophonist Hailey Niswanger losing her home, or the legendary Madlib losing his invaluable archives, of family and friends and more of those folks affected by ever encroaching diasters in our phones until we’re the ones doing the filming. The humanity of the situation is always in the background of the flattened avatars to whom we’re parasocially connected, their need for help in this moment more real than the ephemeral pixels constantly swiped away.

Late that Tuesday night as Joe Sanders and Logan Richardson were wrapping up a studio session in Williamsburg outside of the festival that was nearing its end for this year anyway, Richardson mentioned to Sanders that he had to turn his rental car back in when he arrives in LA, but he’s wasn’t sure how that was going to go and no one at the rental car office was picking up the phone. It was understandable, they had a lot going on at the time. Besides, he wasn’t heading back to the West Coast for another few days and the car wasn’t due quite yet anyway, but it was still worth some concern. Situations have changed, to put things quite mildly. The earth is shaking us humans to our core and we still move forward with our agendas.

A Note on the Travels of Cannabis Subculture

In my travels across the country over the last few years, I’ve taken great delight in observing the similarities and differences in purchasing cannabis in various states. Coming from Texas, my experience with the substance can’t be comfortably referenced in this particular medium, but I would say I had the appropriate appreciation of it upon my moving to Oregon, a state renowned for its legality, approach and culture of quality around cannabis. The entire notion of playing jazz music on the radio in a state where weed is legal was one of the major selling points of moving across the country for this job.

Yet it was in this trip to New York that I noticed a similarity that I could not go any longer without questioning in public-- how do so many dispensaries from coast to coast have the same digital interface? While this is speaking solely from limited anecdotal observations, it has been rather perplexing to see all manner of kiosks and websites from New York to Oregon, Nevada to Illinois, whether there be a waiting room in the front or a packaging room in the back, the same digital menu with those same rounded corners on the tabs will assuredly glow on the screen, as if to say you can trust this place because they’re legit enough to spring for the most respectable interface in the game.

How did this software get everywhere? How did they land on those rounded corners? The menu tabs of flower, edibles, concentrates and disposables all make logical sense. The sale tab goes where it should go in any UI. But something about this seems too uniform, the market somehow cornered. It’s the kind of one-size-fits-all operation that feels efficient and hopefully benevolent, because all this still runs too independently for things to turn nefarious.

That being said, I truly fail to understand the dispensary model that involves interacting with a kiosk which sends an order to a back packaging room. I could have done this entire process from my hotel room and arranged for pickup, or I could theoretically if I didn’t have to pay in cash and therefore use the ATMs off to the side of the room. Every new interaction with this process of newfound legitimacy, especially in Manhattan which only recently found itself on the right side of the law on this matter, is the added wrinkle in the fabric, the details that make it all more interesting. Yes, it’s annoying and anxiety inducing, but so is buying and consuming weed in Texas unless you know the right people, especially as a Black person in Usonia.

However, these annoying details also come with the other elements that come with the true agricultural matters of dealing with burning and inhaling the fumes of dry, infused plants from the Atlantic Northeast instead of the lush, fertile Pacific Northwest buds I and my respiratory system would quickly come to love and appreciate. I didn’t not get high but I also didn’t not get congested as the marathons of the weekend gave way to the looser evening shows of the following week. I also didn’t appreciate how weed, like just about everything else in New York, was more expensive than in Oregon. My nine day trip felt like Bruce Willis' opening montage in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element where we see Willis' cabbie character Korben Dallas has only four cigarettes to sustain him through the course of the day. Any weed smoker worth their salt would understand the apportioning of resources over time, so this wasn’t a new challenge for me. Much like navigating the streets from hotel to venue and point of interest in between would depend on the aforementioned phone maps and teamwork, I figured I’d be fine over the course of the week. Weed is meant to be shared.

There were certainly instances where my supply was elongated, from gifts from others and the obvious joined rotation in progress or safety meeting on the walk between venues. There’s also great love for the last joint of the night. Whether it’s after a long day of work, a long evening of shows, dancing, talking, moving, vibing, or just getting through, there’s some beautiful quality in the last joint smoked of the night-- the airy relief after, the second wind for the last adventure before heads hit pillow, one more gently tinted burst of light to color the earned fatigue of a party well done. The aperitif for the late night snack.

Greenland Gourmet Deli & Grocery across the street from Nublu (151 off E. 10th St., not Nublu Classic off E. 5th) is legit. I have that on the word of Amaury Acosta whose New York roots go back to the legendary Manhattan Plaza of Hell’s Kitchen where every cool artist you know from New York probably came from that rent-controlled apartment complex (and on whose balcony I once smoked almost a decade ago). That deli was a frequent stop throughout our week in New York as it made sense to get a chopped cheese before heading back to the hotel at the end of the night. While I may not have been wowed by the chopped cheese sandwich, I’m a sucker for a chicken Caesar wrap.

At the end of one of those nights, some of us had one of those moments when the people you admire who are making the move from “person from phone” to “cool with and some inside jokes” familiarity still find themselves joining your nightcap joint rotation on the walk back to the hotel, joining in the same exclamatory fervency you all feel about New York weed. “New York weed ain’t shit!”, this person would say to our Oregonian group’s hearty agreement just before a slight moment of lightheadedness and recollecting themself. In a moment like this, one would have two thoughts– Is this happening? This is happening. The subsequent thought is– I knew I wasn’t crazy! New York weed ain’t shit! But it still works. We are joined by our humanity and our appreciation for humidity.

Day 4 Exhaustion Extended

Any festival is going to get exhausting at some point, no matter the degree of talent one is blessed to witness. If you’re watching impeccable performances night after night starting on Tuesday, you’re going to find yourself tired out by Sunday and we were leaving the following Thursday. The pace slows after the very rhetorical but no less physically imposing marathon nights of Friday and Saturday, easing off with perhaps one or two shows that still result in being out late into the cold nights that still ends up occurring through sheer momentum and fumes.

I called my mother on Sunday morning, as I do every Sunday ever since we instituted the practice when I went off to college some twenty years ago. This one was her birthday, which made things extra special as she looped my sister in for a three-way call. I otherwise wandered the city in the blustery cold for a while, fighting a building sense of congestion that I through strength of will and claiming the blood of Jesus for it not to turn into a full blown cold (which it didn’t!), navigated the city aimlessly before returning back to my hotel room and turning into bed at a very early 9:00 PM and followed nearly the same model the following day until Matt called me at a quarter to midnight saying I should roll with him to Nublu for Ray Angry’s Producer Mondays with special guests. I missed both of the Strata-East Rising performances at Le Poisson Rouge earlier that evening which many of the KMHD crew attended but I really didn’t feel up to the task of going out, especially after already being undressed and in bed. Against my better judgement, I redressed and embarked on the walk to Alphabet City, my body temperature shifting from warm to cold to warm again in the crowded club at the conclusion of a brisk walk. It only took half of a(n $8) beer for me to feel lightheaded and need to sit outside in the cold air to find my equilibrium again. I was already getting tired and grumpy and seeing my way on the back end of this trip.

Call it my current state of being in constant transition after so long a time living in my hometown, but I’m not quite understanding Portland’s love of the biscuit. As a southerner, I understand that starches are primarily a means of conveyance for butter, an understanding we Southerners share with the French. I have yet to encounter a biscuit that is moist and buttery enough to make me not miss my home of Texas so dearly, though I did manage to find the best chicken and waffles that I’ve had in months in Brooklyn while running into an old internet friend the following Tuesday before heading off to a studio session in Williamsburg. On a trip that involved the physical manifestation of internet discourse, it was nice to take a brief diversion and still scratch an itch for chicken and waffles that I’ve had for quite some time. It was moments like these that were difficult to delineate between some friend I’ve made from a Tumblr account long ago from jazz journalists and radio personalities I’ve heard for decades. These were all the physical versions of the avatars of themselves on the internet, the source of their digital traces.

By the last night after a fulfilling staff dinner half a block from our hotel and two blocks from where Derek managed to book a DJ gig while I rushed off to Brooklyn’s Roulette to catch Ganavya give her interpretation of the archival recordings of Les Filles de Illighadad (which it should be noted that “Tende” is a banger), I was full to the brim, pressed down, shaken together and running over.

Epilogue

I don’t get it. Maybe it’s because I’m at the first half of the Donald Glover joke about not enjoying it because he’s poor, but loves it now that he’s rich, but I don’t get New York. I was overwhelmed with options, adrift in connections, lacking an agenda in a quivering mass of others set and striving so ardently toward theirs that I couldn’t even think much of what to see or accomplish in the nine days I had in New York to cover the Winter Jazzfest. On these sorts of things, I’m best set with work, which is most of what I tended to throughout the first part of the week, bandied about from event to event, seeing an abundance of music all presented at the highest level of talent (if one were to use hierarchical qualitative terms on art) and finally seeing in person all the folks I have written about, admired, and have been moved by over the last decade and a half of my career in music journalism. When it came to the job, coming to this festival and seeing it all take place after only imagining it for so many years, it was a particularly cool thing to witness.

Yet at the end of it, all I am is cold and cowed by capitalism, all of it so massive and seemingly inevitable a result from centuries of the tired and huddled masses amassing on one metropolitan area. However, this cauldron of the many is a trial by fire, where so much is possible in so little available space because everyone and everything is fighting so hard to stay there and are proving themselves to do so. It would only make natural sense that a festival extracted from the exposition of the arts would take place.

But enmeshed in every “you good” I encountered was the feeling like my “sorry”s were unnecessary in my interactions. When the ongoing ethos is “keep it moving”, there isn’t enough time to be caught up in one’s head. This, also, is the ethos of jazz, it only took a sense of grueling sensory overload for me to put that idea together again.

We returned to a city that was awaiting us and airwaves we were anxious to grace again. We wanted to spread the word about Isaiah Collier, Immanuel Wilkins, Arooj Aftab, and others who would find their way to our town not long after we saw them. We wanted to play Sophye Soliveau on the radio the moment we arrived, aghast we had just learned about her immense talent and were rectifying that oversight as soon as possible.

A couple weeks after our return, I was set to DJ at Hey Love alongside Blair Stapp, host of Zoot Pursuits. We had a lovely evening playing records and discovering we had a lot of the same albums in our bags. The crowd at the bar was bustling but largely nonchalant from the opening until about 10:30 when folks started departing precipitously. It was a Thursday night in Deaduary and I remembered we’re back in sleepy Portland, the unpretentious town that tucks in early. I remembered that this is my primary audience, the folks who brought me here. After everything that went on the last few weeks and all the directions I was pulled in the cold, I honestly missed them.

Anthony Dean-Harris hosts the Smooth Ride, Mondays-Fridays 2-4 P.M. at Portland’s jazz radio KMHD and is also a contributing writer for DownBeat Magazine.