What about McCoy and Wayne?
After posting about the RIJF’s advance press release about Woody Allen, I finally was able to sit down and read the rest of last week’s City Paper and noted in News & Views that they had written about the advance warning that Pollstar provides (which as I noted is where the prior warnings came from). I agree—you can’t blame us for wanting to know how the fest is shaping up. We really want this thing to survive and flourish. The real question is whether and how many of us have purchased our Club Passes. I have (for my wife and myself) and I expect Seth over at Cup O’ Books and Ken at Fretful Porpentine have purchased theirs too (by the way, like Ken, I too will not be joining the swells in Eastman Theater for Woody, so that I can catch Charlie Hunter). Back to City Paper, which wrote:
You can’t blame the Rochester International Jazz Festival . . . for wanting to keep its line-up under wraps for a while. There’s nothing like the knockout punch of a news conference packed with names that make jazz fans salivate.
But you also can’t blame jazz fans for checking Pollstar.com—the concert website&emdash;from time to time. We’ve been checking and, if early indications hold up (things can change in four months), the festival is shaping up wonderfully.
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The article also listed all those found in my previous advance warnings, plus “McCoy Tyner, one of the greatest pianists in jazz history” and “Wayne Shorter, a brilliant saxophonist and a key creative force in Miles Davis’s mid-1960s quintet and in the 1970s-80s fusion group, Weather Report.” Reading that, I vaguely remembered that while I was in Kansas, I read that Tyner and Shorter were going to be appearing and thought “wow, we’ve arrived.” I heard McCoy Tyner play in Evanston, Illinois, while I was still living there 5 or 6 years back, but had never heard Wayne Shorter and have come to appreciate his playing and writing more and more.
Perhaps we’re just pointing to the reason behind John Nugent’s (the RIJF promoter) hesitancy to announce the lineup (although they’re not hesitating about Woody Allen), but Tyner and Shorter are no longer listed on Pollstar (as of this post) and their websites don’t show them as booked for RIJF either. Perhaps they’re not coming after all? That would be sad . . . but I’m sure Nugent will find someone else to fill their shoes. I agree with City Paper . . . this year’s fest is shaping up wonderfully.
