Ledisi, Raphael Saadiq & More Perform – Billboard

The Soul Rebels with Big Freedia. Butcher Brown, Digable Planets, Ledisi and the West Coast Get Down that includes Leon Bridges and Raphael Saadiq. Shoutouts to Father’s Day, Juneteenth, hip-hop’s 50^thanniversary, Black Music Month and Pride Month. There was one thing for everybody in the course of the second day of the annual Hollywood Bowl Jazz Festival (June 18).

“You love music like I do; you want every dribbling drop of it,” mentioned competition host Arsenio Hall in his welcome remarks. “I will be the ringmaster of the circle of jazz artists today … And there’s just one rule. Leave all of your troubles behind and have a musical picnic like no other.”

And the Bowl’s full home did simply that, starting with youth act the LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) Beyond the Bell All District Jazz Big Band with particular visitor Charlie Young. Then giving inspirational music a unique twist was Andrew Gouché and Prayze Connection. Nicknamed “the godfather of gospel bass,” Grammy winner Gouché — who has performed for Mary Mary, Michael Jackson and Aretha Franklin — first led the band in a mellow, shifting tackle “The Lord’s Prayer.” Then the group, which included Gouché’s nephew Davion Farris, segued into a number of different songs, together with the Clark Sisters’ basic “You Brought the Sunshine” and covers of two songs recorded by gospel star Fred Hammond, “Let the Praise Begin” and “Blessed,” that includes particular visitors Eric Dawkins (with a dance help from the Cardinal Divas of the SC Drum Line) and one other Gouché nephew, D Smoke, respectively.

During the late afternoon part of the competition, jazz and world music aficionados had been handled to invigorating units by Richmond, Virginia, quintet Butcher Brown and Boukman Eksperyans. The latter held courtroom with their contemporary, percolating fusion of jazz, hip-hop, soul, funk and R&B on songs like “Frontline” and “It Was Me.” Among the eight picks carried out by Grammy-nominated Haitian group Boukman Eksperyans throughout its crowd-pleasing set had been “Jou Nou Revolte Granbwa Ile,” “Kalfou O!” and “Tan Bou.”

New Orleans brass band The Soul Rebels then took the gang to the following stage with its distinctive model of soul, funk, R&B, rock, pop and jazz. Raising the high-energy bar with the raucous “Turn It Up” and “Rebel Rock,” the ensemble turned the amount all the way in which up when bounce music grasp Big Freedia hit the stage — and obtained her twerk on — for a noteworthy three-song set: “I Heard,” “N. O. Bounce” and “Gin in My System.”

Thirty years have elapsed since Digable Planets launched its gold-certified debut album Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space). But the nice and cozy Bowl reception given to the rap trio made it look like it was solely yesterday when the album’s first single, “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” grew to become a Billboard Hot 100 prime 15 hit and gained the group a Grammy for finest rap efficiency. Before closing their look with that track and a standing ovation, Digable Planets labored their means by way of different first-album tracks “Where I’m From,” “Escapism (Getting’ Free)” and “Nickel Bags,” plus “It’s Good to Be Here,” “Cool Breezes” and “Graffiti” — and proved it has misplaced none of its enduring magic. 

Ledisi and her versatile four-octave soprano stored the captivated viewers in fixed cheer-and-applaud mode throughout her 45-minute look. Performance standouts included “Add to Me,” the colourful scat-accented “Alright” (“It’s a jazz fest so you’ve got to have some scatting”), the autobiographical “Pieces of Me,” newest single “I Need to Know” and the searing ballad “Anything for You,” which gained the singer-songwriter a Grammy for finest conventional R&B efficiency in 2021.

The collective West Coast Get Down, with founder and jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington, closed the competition together with Grammy-winning particular visitors Leon Bridges and Raphael Saadiq. Bridges’ set with the band featured a well-received three-song medley: “Born Again,” “Bad Bad News” and “Kings and Queens.” An effervescent Saadiq rocked the stage along with his bass guitar on “You’re the One That I Like,” “The Sun” and “Skyy, Can You Feel Me.”

The 2023 Hollywood Bowl Jazz Festival was curated by Washington and jazz icon Herbie Hancock. On opening day (June 17), host Hall welcomed performers St. Paul and The Broken Bones, Poncho Sanchez, Bell Biv DeVoe, Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance Ensemble at UCLA, Washington and Samara Joy, a double Grammy winner this yr for finest jazz vocal album and finest new artist.