Music Here, There, and Everywhere in Sag
Christian McBride and Friends will headline the fourth annual Sag Harbor American Music Festival with a concert and fund-raiser at the Old Whalers Church Friday at 8 p.m. The festival will continue with free performances by a plethora of bands and solo musicians throughout the day Saturday and conclude with an after-party at Bay Street Theater with Mamalee Rose and Friends that evening at 9.
A bassist, composer, arranger, educator, curator, and administrator, Mr. McBride moved to New York at the age of 17 to study at the Juilliard School but was soon conscripted into the New York jazz scene by Bobby Watson, a noted alto saxophonist. A three-time Grammy winner, Mr. McBride recorded the first of his 12 CDs, “Gettin’ to It,” in 1994.
As a jazz sideman he has played with Freddie Hubbard, Sonny Rollins, J.J. Johnson, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson, McCoy Tyner, Roy Haynes, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Pat Metheny. In the R&B world, he has performed with and arranged for Isaac Hayes, Chaka Khan, Natalie Cole, Lalah Hathaway, and James Brown.
Mr. McBride has collaborated with Sting, Carly Simon, Don Henley, and Bruce Hornsby in the pop/rock orbit and the Roots, D’Angelo, and Queen Latifah in the hip-hop world. He has also worked closely with the opera legend Kathleen Battle, the bass virtuoso Edgar Meyer, the Shanghai Quartet, and the Sonus Quartet.
Mr. McBride’s first foray into the world of big band composing and arranging dates back to 1995, when he was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center to write “Bluesin’ in Alphabet City,” originally debuted by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Since that time he has composed a number of pieces for larger ensembles, including “The Movement Revisited,” a four-movement suite dedicated to Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
For tomorrow’s concert, he will be accompanied by Ulysses Owens Jr., a Grammy Award-winning drummer, Emmet Cohen, a finalist in the 2011 Thelonious Monk International Piano Competition, and Marcus Strickland, a saxophonist with seven albums to his credit.
On Saturday, more than 30 other groups and individual performers can be heard at various village locations throughout the day, among them the HooDoo Loungers, the Richie Siegler Brazilian Jazz Quartet, Joe Delia and Thieves, Caroline Doctorow and the Steamrollers, Inda Eaton, and Black and Sparrow.
Among the many Saturday venues is the Off Main stage in the alley next to the Romany Kramoris Gallery. The Bridgehampton High School Marimba Ensemble will kick off the day with a 10 a.m. performance there. Escola De Samba BOOM, a 30-piece percussion group, will perform at 11 at Windmill Beach.
Each group will play for an hour, and performances will start every half hour. The regular performances will conclude with the Gene Casey Trio at La Superica at 8 p.m. A complete schedule is available at sagharbormusic.org.
“The first time out, we wanted to be sure to come out in the black, so we only booked bands as we collected sponsorship money,” said Kelly C. Dodds, who founded the festival in 2011. Every performer in the festival and three professional sound crews are paid. “When we applied for our permit from the village, we thought we’d have four bands or so. Well, we ended up having close to 20 different acts that year!”
“When I moved here permanently in 2009, I was blown away by the talent at the Jazz Jam Session at Bay Burger,” said Ms. Dodds, who is the festival’s president and co-artistic director. A survey of community leaders convinced her that a music festival would be well received and, encouraged by John Landes of Bay Burger, she formed a board, attained nonprofit status, and took on Kerry Farrell as co-artistic director.
General admission tickets for Christian McBride and Friends are $25; limited, reserved seats can be had for $45. Admission to the after-party is $10. Festival income is used to support local school music programs and live music performances throughout the year.
In the event of rain, all Off Main performances will take place at Bay Street Theater, and Customs House lawn performances will move into Old Whalers Church.