The sounds of jazz and blues will float across the Morristown Green once again when the Morristown Jazz & Blues Festival takes place Saturday, Sept. 17. The festival is free to attend and this year’s lineup includes a stellar mix of swing, big band, and group jazz with a pair of blues artists — one an up-and-coming star and the other a Jersey legend.
The festival kicks off this year with James Langton’s New York All-Star Big Band at noon. They are a 14-piece big band based in New York City, featuring some of the best musicians in the area.
“We’ve got absolutely stellar musicians with us at Morristown,” said Langton. “Rossano Sportiello on piano — he’s just an absolutely magnificent player, so I’m going to choose pieces of music when he’s going to get an opportunity to shine. We want everyone to hear him because he’s absolutely marvelous. We’ve got Mike Davis on trumpet who came out of the Manhattan School of Music. He’s got the whole Louis Armstrong thing down, so we’ll probably include a piece by Armstrong. Mike is going to sound great doing that. Our lead trumpet player, Brian Paseschi, is doing a Broadway show right now. He enjoys a night off from the show; it’s a nice change of scenery.”
English-born Langton trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. He believes his acting training has helped him be a good frontman.
“It certainly informs everything I do,” explained Langton. “I would say I’m much more of a showman than I am a musician, really. My forte — even though I’m playing in a band — is the presentation and I sing as well. I trained as an actor because I was already a bit of a showoff! That’s part and parcel of what I do.”
Langton says his band will most likely choose a set with songs most of the audience will know like “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra, and the band will definitely get the festival off to a swinging start.
Performing at 2 p.m. will be a familiar face to the festival — Frank Vignola’s Guitar Night at Birdland Band. For years, Vignola played with Bucky Pizzarelli in this time slot and he paid tribute to the legendary Jersey artist at last year’s festival.
“I always feel like I’m coming home when I play in Jersey,” said Vignola. “The park is such a great venue for a show. The people of New Jersey, the New Jersey Jazz Society, and First Night Morristown have been supporting me for 30 years now. The festival is really the only show I do in New Jersey for the year now.”
Vignola’s quartet includes pianist John DiMartino, guitarist Jimmy Bruno, bassist Gary Mazzaroppi, and drummer Vince Cherico. Clarinetist Ken Peplowski will be their special guest at Morristown and join the band on a few tunes.
Five years ago, Frank Vignola had a life-threatening accident when he crashed his all-terrain vehicle into a tree. He was airlifted from his home in New York to the trauma center at St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Paterson. His recovery took a long time and playing guitar again was painful. Ironically, Frank’s two guitar heroes, Les Paul and Django Reinhardt, both faced major accidents and recovered, which gave him hope.
“To me, it’s just amazing there was a moment where I thought I can never do this again,” recalled Vignola. “Just trying to get up and walk to the bathroom was a challenge; never mind healing to get back to playing and touring. But it’s amazing how people can inspire you. One of my students came up to the house. He was a 72-year-old man who was in Vietnam; sick much of his whole life because of that. He was the first one to visit and came with an old Gibson guitar and he gave it to me. He’s like, ‘Now come on, get back at it!’ I was like if this guy goes out of his way to drive two hours to my house — that was kind of the beginning for me. Ok, time to get back at it.”
The Bria Skonberg Quintet follows at 4 p.m. The trumpeter and songwriter was born and raised in British Columbia, Canada, and has lived in New York City since 2010. Nate Chinen once wrote in the NY Times that she “has become the shining hope of hot jazz, on the strength of a clarion trumpet style indebted to Louis Armstrong, a smooth purr of a singing voice inspired by Anita O’Day and the wholesome glow of youth.”
Skonberg plans to have an interesting set in Morristown. “You’ll hear a little bit of everything! It’s been so much fun to let loose on the Nothing Never Happens songs as the album was released just before 2020 and I had to wait to perform it. I’ve been enjoying revisiting some older material to feel grounded after the flux of the last few years, and I’m ready to pepper in a few more ideas I’m working on for my next album,” she explained.
There’s a wonderful quote on Skonberg’s website that says, “I play Jazz because it’s the closest I can get to flying…” When asked if that’s because jazz is a genre that lets people express themselves in the moment and truly be free, she replied, “Yes indeed, that’s the goal! It has unlimited potential when you factor in the music, the context, the ideas, the individual and the group voices… That’s why we practice our instruments for thousands of hours, to get beyond the technical aspects and be able to communicate emotions in real time.”
Skonberg is a veteran of festivals, having performed at some of the biggest in the world (New Orleans Jazz & Heritage, Newport Jazz and Montreal Jazz Festival, to name a few), and says she enjoys seeing friends perform at festivals and being introduced to new acts. She also treats each show as something unique — especially based on its setting.
“It’s not about where, it’s about who’s playing and whether or not the venue inspires them,” noted Skonberg. “I change my set list and even the individual song treatments depending on the space and vibe. You may have heard us play a song before but we’ll vary tempo and feel to match and enhance the mood. I love them all. Clubs are intimate and transparent, halls allow mystique and plotted show elements, outdoor festivals are pure communal joy and hold some of my happiest early memories of experiencing jazz.”
At 6 p.m. the festival heats up with Veronica Lewis, a young piano player from New Hampshire who plays the blues with the fire of Jerry Lee Lewis. She may have only graduated high school last year, but her first album, “You Ain’t Unlucky,” reached #2 on the Billboard Blues Charts and has made her an emerging star — something that still amazes her.
“I had no expectations for the first album,” explained Lewis. “I didn’t know if anyone was going to listen to it. We just kind of threw it together from recordings we had done previous to the pandemic. I recorded most of it at home. Even the official music video was shot with our friends. We had no plan or anything. I think you can kind of feel that with the album, the video and the songs. It is very raw. It’s very authentic. If you hear it, you can get to know me fully. The production is very stripped down and it’s almost like you can press play and hear me through it.”
The piano rarely takes a lead in music these days, but the way Veronica Lewis plays it will make you wonder if others will follow her lead. She says she never had any formal piano lessons; she learned by playing along to early rock and rollers like Little Richard and The Killer himself. She listened to all of the great blues players as well. Before long she was not only playing music but writing her own songs.
“I definitely had musical taste that’s pretty wide, but what really struck me, when I was younger, was this style of playing piano,” said Lewis. “I feel like in a lot of music the piano isn’t at the forefront of the song or music. When I was 5 years old, I saw a video of Jerry Lee Lewis and I thought, ‘Look at that - the piano is at the front; he’s lighting the whole thing on fire, and he’s making it exciting!’ There’s this style of playing where you have the bass line in the left hand and the melody in the right. It’s a very fun style to play.”
In Morristown, people can expect to hear some unreleased songs as she has been writing and she is anxious for people to hear the new work. She hopes to release her follow-up album sometime next year. Right now, she’s enjoying playing live again.
“I feel like coming out of the pandemic that everybody is still a little shocked from what happened, so I’m grateful for every show I get to do — especially festivals where I get to see and be part of so much great music. Everybody has such a great time at a festival,” said Lewis.
The festival concludes at 8 p.m. with Walter Trout, a true New Jersey legend. He's been a lead guitarist for John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton, and played in Canned Heat and John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers before launching a solo career. His 30th solo album, “Ride,” was released in August and is already being called one of his best. He wrote the songs for the album in just 12 days while alone in his California house. He says all he did was work on music. One listen to the album will tell you that he had a lot on his mind. It’s a deeply personal album; one that brings scars from throughout his life into focus.
“For me, it’s sort of the only way I can do it,” admitted Trout. “If you think that this is my 30th album (I think there are three live albums and one album of Luther Allison covers) so this is probably my 26th studio album. We’re looking at 280 to 300 songs I’ve written and recorded. I can tell you every one of them has a story that’s about something I’ve been through, something I feel, or something I’ve seen a friend of mine go through. I have to be able to really relate to the lyrics in order to sing it. I can’t just sing nonsense, it doesn’t work for me. Bob Dylan has a line on his latest album ‘I can’t sing a song I don’t believe,’ and I feel the same way.”
Trout lived in New Jersey until he was 23. The Garden State was where he started playing music, eventually leaving his dreams of being a jazz trumpet player for the guitar. It’s also where the blues first connected with him and changed his world.
“I lived in suburban New Jersey (Ocean City) as a kid and my father had blues albums,” recalled Trout. “This was the late 1950s and my dad had records by John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, T-Bone Walker. I was hearing that stuff growing up, but it never really grabbed me until I heard Michael Bloomfield when I was 14. He took blues and he mixed this kind of rock and roll fire and aggression with it! He played it fast and full of fire. It’s just these three chords, but what you can do over these three chords is limitless. It provides you with a beautiful base that you can express yourself over and you can build on that form. You can really take that form different places.”
If you only heard Trout speak about New Jersey from his song lyrics, you might get the idea that it was a place he hated. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“I have great memories — especially of a town I lived in from third grade to eighth grade; a town called Laurel Springs,” said Trout. “I loved Laurel Springs, but that was the house with the train that the title song is about. I was living in that house with my stepdad and there were times I was in fear of my life, but I had great friends there. I had great times, loved the school there, and I’m still good friends with a lot of the kids I grew up with in that town.”
Trout has performed at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Collingswood every few years. It’s a venue located just a few blocks from where he once lived. He says a lot of times when he plays there half of his graduating class shows up and they have a mini reunion.
There’s a wonderful video for “Ride” which begins with a young Walter Trout playing guitar while the train passes by his house in Laurel Springs. It switches back and forth between the past, trains, and Walter performing live today with subtle references to the trouble in his house. Eventually, both the younger and current Walter Trout are playing alongside each other. “I dreamed the train would carry me far away from the trouble that I knew” he sings.
Did he ever hop on board to escape?
“I thought about it all the time, but I never did,” said Trout. “I never summoned the courage because I knew in reality I would jump on the freight train and God knows where I’d end up — probably in a train yard in Philly looking around going, ‘What now?’”
The guitar was his means of escape. Trout mentions a biography of him written about nine years ago called, “Rescued From Reality.”
“What that means is that the music was my rescue,” explained Trout. “It rescued me from the reality of a lot of bad shit going on. It was an escape and it still is an escape. It’s not like I feel I have to escape, but it’s a place I can climb into and I’m safe. When I’m playing the guitar, I’m playing it through a good amp and I have an amazing group of musicians playing with me. It’s just pure joy.”
The 2022 Morristown Jazz & Blues Festival takes place Saturday, Sept. 17 at Morristown Green, a historical park located in the center of Morristown, New Jersey. It is easily accessible by car, train or bus. The Green is on Route 124 (Madison Avenue) and Route 202 (Speedwell Avenue) just a couple of miles west of Route 287.
