Jack DeJohnette’s all-star band tear it up for his 81st birthday salute to Miles

It is a given that a concert with three drummers is going to be loud. And when those are some of jazz’ heavy hitters in Jack DeJohnette, Cindy Blackman Santana and Wil Calhoun, add a few more decibels. Throw in paired guitarists and bassists –Carlos Santana and Vernon Reid and Matthew Garrison and Doug Wimbish –plus percussionist Luisito Quintero, trumpeter Wallace Roney, Jr., saxophonist/clarinetist Don Byron and keyboard player George Colligan and you better have earplugs.

The location was Ulster Performing Arts Center (UPAC) in Kingston, about a two-hour drive north of New York City, and the 9 August occasion a Miles Davis tribute led by DeJohnette on what was the drummer’s 81st birthday, the proceedings a benefit for the performing arts organization Shapeshifter+ co-run by Garrison. UPAC has become DeJohnette’s venue of choice as he has stopped touring, just down the road from his Woodstock home. Unsurprisingly, the 1,500-person audience skewed grey-haired and, given the proximity to one of hippiedom’s most storied locales, many left their assigned seats to boogie in the lobby.

Byron, Colligan and Garrison are DeJohnette’s regular collaborators. Reid, Wimbish and Calhoun comprise three-quarters of famed fusion group Living Colour (fourth member, vocalist Corey Glover, also made an appearance). The Santanas were announced as special guests a few days before the concert.

DeJohnette started the evening with an invocation played on three remarkably reverberant gongs, the layered vibration and decay filling every crevice of the nearly-100-year-old theater. He then got behind the center kit, a martial rhythm setting up a vamp for introductions of the band and a spirited reading of Davis’ ‘What I Say’.

In addition to being a celebration of Davis, with whom DeJohnette played from 1968-72, the show was a belated remembrance of saxophonist Wayne Shorter, DeJohnette’s pal from his Davis days and beyond. ‘Footprints’ opened with a lengthy Quintero solo before moving into a spacy jam. But the iconic bassline was buried in the percussive onslaught and one has to feel for Roney, Jr., whose father was too often dismissed as a Davis clone and has now inherited that unfortunate mantle, at least in this context. Santana sounded a little unsure during his solo, as if he was remembering how to play this way after years of more pop-oriented work. Reid, however, in the one part of the concert where he was truly audible, was his typically face-melting self, later inspiring a flurry of trades with Santana.

This eventually segued back to Davis with ‘Sanctuary’ and then a tangentially relevant reading of ‘Acknowledgment’, the first section of John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’ featuring a Byron solo and Santana, who had recorded a version with fellow guitarist John McLaughlin in the early ‘70s, sounding much more comfortable. Members of the band chanted the title, including the aforementioned Glover, encouraged to join by Reid, who added nice vocal acrobatics. Glover would return at the end of the night for the encore of Jimi Hendrix’ ‘Voodoo Child’.

Davis’ ‘Seven Steps to Heaven’ in the second set – which began with a fascinating electronically-processed duet of Garrison and Calhoun on both tribal drum and transverse flute and then Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’, part of Davis’ 1980s repertoire – was the most successful effort of the evening. It was introduced by a pummeling Blackman Santana solo channeling the late Tony Williams at his fiercest and then a fascinating section where solos by Roney then Byron and finally Colligan were supported in turn by Calhoun, Blackman Santana and DeJohnette. Another smaller grouping with Roney, Colligan, Garrison, Quintero and Blackman Santana was the Santana feature ‘Capri’, written by keyboard player Paolo Rustichelli (and on which Davis played in duo with composer on the original 1990 recording); it was very pleasant, all the more so for being able to hear everyone clearly.

The second set closed with DeJohnette’s composition ‘Miles’, written shortly after its dedicatee’s death in 1991 (and appearing on DeJohnette’s 1992 album Music For The Fifth World with Reid and Calhoun in the group). The groove was deep and funky but suffered once more from the sheer force of so much volume, Santana in particular overwhelming the others.

This was the issue with most of the night. Even at its raucous the various elements of electric Miles were still discernible. Reid, Colligan and Wimbish were often washed out of the mix and even the frontline horns had trouble pushing through Santana’s volume. He may have been the invited guest and draw for much of the audience but DeJohnette and Co. deserved to be heard as well.