PINO PALLADINO AND BLAKE MILLS FEATURING SAM GENDEL AND ABE ROUNDS + Opener TBA

Saturday, July 30, 2022

Le Poisson Rouge, (158 Bleecker Street NYC)

7pm doors / 8pm show

For improvising musicians across New York, Winter Jazzfest’s return to live stages this month might have brought a whiff of near normalcy — not to mention more than 100 packed gigs in the span of just over a week — to a much-beleaguered scene. For audiences, it would have been a moment to dive back in at the deep end: skipping around, from clubs to theaters to makeshift stages, hearing how jazz’s creative winds have shifted over the past two years.

That wasn’t in the cards. With the Omicron variant surging, organizers tabled the festival’s live portion, and instead threw together an impressive series of digital broadcasts that chase the event’s now 18-year-old mission: checking in on jazz’s myriad state-of-affairs at the top of each calendar year. (There are rumblings of a possible summer edition of the festival; so far just one show has been announced, a Pino Palladino and Blake Mills gigon July 30.)

Ultimately, over 30 groups played at digital events spread across nine nights, including four straight “marathon” shows that approximated the live festival’s signature event. Rather than fanning out at venues across Lower Manhattan, the festival featured 20-minute recordings that artists had independently captured in studios and venues all over New York — and beyond