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Cool is just about all these musicians share
JAZZ FESTIVAL | Seu Jorge, Andy Bey have the same mad enthusiasm
BY GREG BUIUM
VANCOUVER SUN
Before Tony Bennett rewired the once 10 (now 11)-day TD Canada Trust Vancouver International Jazz Festival, tonight's male singers were actually set tobe the headlining acts: Seu Jorge, the Brazilian actor, guitarist and songwriter (at the Centre fonthe Performing Arts), and Andy Bey, the New York pianist and composer (at Perfor mance Works).
Their bond? Practically nothing, really apart from that kind of mad, mix-tape enthusiasm that's always animated this festival's programming philosophy.
Jorge, 36, is a multifaceted pop star, better known perhaps as an actor (Knockout Ned in the film City of God) and as the singing sub- mariner in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, where he turned David Bowie hits into Portuguese sambas.
Bey, 66, on the other hand, is genuine jazz crooner, here at the crest of a late-blooming career, magnificent baritone who lifts Sting's Fragile or Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? into art song.
But seeing them on the schedule together is a kind of classic VIJF comment - unintended, perhaps, but a comment nonetheless.
On the eve of their Vancouver debuts, these two singers are among the hippest modern musicians you've never heard of. Text book hip: great to look at, simple storytellers, absolutely under-the-radar tastes. They're real what-you see-is-what-you-get characters allergic to marketing and labels and, yes, fashion. And they've flourished anyway.
"I have worked very hard to get to this point, I want it to carry on," Jorge explained in an e-mail exchange from a tour stop in Miami. "I am very realistic about the industry and because I have come from a very difficult childhood, it makes me want to succeed more. don't want to end up where I began like so many other people I know - fear is an amazing emotion."
The story of Seu Jorge (pronounced SAY-oo ZHOR-zhee) is almost in itself torn from a fiction. He grew up in a Rio de Janeiro favela (or slum). In his early 20s, he became homeless and soon began playing guitar at a theatre he'd been sleeping in. One day the theatre company offered him some work, as a musician. "
They then realized I had a talent and started to teach me how to act," Jorge remembers.
His big break, however, was Wes Andersen's 2004 film, The Life Aquatic. "
Wes loves David Bowie and has always wanted to have his music in one of his films," Jorge explains, having been referred to Anderson by the producer of City of God.
Amazingly, Jorge didn't know Bowie's music, only let's Dance, which had been an early '80s hit in Brazil. Anderson favoured the ear lier classics: Life on Mars, Ziggy Stardust and Rebel, Rebel.
"I had to rewrite a lot of the songs and just go with my instinct with what [I] felt the songs meant," Jorge explained, remembering how poor his English was at the time.
But Jorge's interpretations were revelatory and extremely beautiful: transforming Bowie into this understated bossa nova maven, where it sometimes takes a few minutes to realize you're hearing slice of classic rock. Campus radio ate them up. So did world music buffs and indie-cinephiles around North America.
It's a crowd that might even admire Andy Bey. His success, modest by comparison, follows similar out-of-the-blue surge towards recognition. "I've had to tell this story a zillion times," Bey says, a beautiful, deep laugh, over the phone from his upper Manhat tan apartment. " You could say it happened by accident, but it hap pened for a reason."
Bey's sudden acclaim came after the 1996 release of Ballads, Blues Bey (Evidence), an extraordinary set of show-tunes and jazz stan dards he sang alone at the piano. It was his first alburn in 22 years.
His trademark? Arrangements crafted almost at 16 r.p.m., where his voice a bass-baritone that travels up into a falsetto shades and shifts and even takes a tune's preface (to, say George and Ira Gershwin's Someone to Watch Over Me) into its own self-contained space. For most of his career, Bey taught and drifted and was never embraced by the record business. The youngest of nine children, he once sang with his sisters, Geral- dine and Salome (a Torontonian since 1963). When he was approached to do Ballads, he had only recently been diagnosed HIV- positive. Three albums later, he is often considered one of the great est living (and least appreciated) male jazz singers.
He'd tell you that race had something to do with it. Doors were often closed to him, he says, because he didn't sing the kind of music (R&B, soul) the business expects from African-American singers. "
They always put black people, in a [stylistic] box. And you just have this limited time to make to make it," he says, alluding to Stevie Wonder's career. "They had their little place in the sun for about five years. But it's alright for some sad , like Rod Stewart...... or the Rolling Stones. They can come out and reinvent themselves any time they want to."
gbuium@yahoo.com
Seu Jorge performs on a double bill with E.S.T. tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Centre for the Performing Arts (777 Homer St.). The Andy Bey Quartet appears tonight and Saturday night at 9p.m. at Performance Works on Granville Island (1218 Cartwright St.).
What's on
Today at the TD Canada Trust Vancouver International Jazz Festival:
Kardlnal Offishall, with Pocket Dwellers, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville St.), 9:30 p.m.
The Thing, with the Nels Cllne Singers, Vancouver East Cultural Centre (1895 Venables St.), 8p.m.
Ron Samworth/Torsten Miiller/Lori Freedman/Ronrt Kirchman, West ern Front (303 East 8th Ave.), 5:30 p.m.
Oliver Gannon Quartet, The Iron works (235 Alexander St.), 8 p.m.
Existential Angst Party, The Iron works, 11 p.m.
Paul Pllmley/lngebrigt Haker Rat- en/Paal Nilssen-Love, Performance Works, 3p.m.
Marty Franklin's Kajambu Trio, Granville Island Market Stage, 12 p.m.
Karin Plato Quintet, CBC/Radio- Canada Studio One Jazz (700 Hamilton St.), 12 p.m. 06/23/06
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