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Bill O'Connell
Fresh from a concert with his Latin Jazz Quintet at Gosman’s Dock in Montauk on Sunday, July 28, the pianist and composer Bill O’Connell is succeeding in bringing world-class jazz to the South Fork. While his talent has taken him and his music around the world, as creative director of the Hamptons Jazz Fest he is committed to spreading the jazz “gospel“ across the East End.
Along with Joel Chriss, the festival’s programming director, O’Connell, who lives in Montauk, has several other noteworthy performances lined up this summer. With the bassist Peter Martin Weiss, who lives in Springs, he will perform on Sunday evenings from 7 to 10 p.m. through August at Mavericks restaurant in Montauk. At 8 p.m. on August 8, he will play with the multiple Grammy Award-nominated singer and composer Nnenna Freelon at Canoe Place Inn in Hampton Bays. O’Connell recorded with Freelon on her 1994 album “Listen.”
“I did a great recording with her,” O’Connell said of Freelon, who is performing with the Count Basie Orchestra this summer. “As creative director, it was natural to want to share her talents with the people of the Hamptons.”
Freelon will perform with O’Connell’s trio, comprising Santi Debriano on bass and Steve Johns on drums.
“It’ll be swinging, with maybe a contemporary flair,” he said. “We’ll be performing a tune we wrote together, ‘Journey of the Heart,’” which is featured on “Listen.” “We will be doing some nice ballads and slower stuff, too. She’s a really great singer in the tradition of great jazz vocalists.”
The Hamptons Jazz Fest, which was founded in 2021, has brought many internationally renowned artists to the South Fork including Wynton Marsalis; Paquito D’Rivera; Ravi Coltrane; Branford Marsalis; Randy Brecker, who is an East Hampton resident, and the Harlem Gospel Choir, which will perform a tribute to Aretha Franklin on August 5 at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. They are ably supplemented by regular performers on the East End including the South Africans Morris Goldberg (saxophone, clarinet, flute) and Bakithi Kumalo (bass); Yacouba Sissoko, master kora player from Mali; the Argentinean saxophonist Oscar Feldman; Hector Martignon, a pianist from Columbia, and the drummer Claes Brondal, who is also executive director of the Hamptons Jazz Fest and, O’Connell said, “a major force in keeping jazz alive out here.”
The Hamptons Jazz Fest is also partnering with new venues including Guild Hall in East Hampton, where Robert Glasper performed on Monday, July 29, and Arturo O’Farrill and the Latin Jazz Ensemble will play on September 14. At LTV Studios in Wainscott, Helen Sung will play a solo concert on August 12 and Zaccai Curtis will perform, also solo, on August 26. Both concerts start at 6 p.m.
“Helen is a great jazz pianist,” O’Connell said, and Curtis, who tours with the saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, “will bring a more Latin side.”
The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, the Southampton Arts Center, the Masonic Temple and The Church in Sag Harbor are also hosting concerts. The full schedule is at hamptonsjazzfest.org/performances.
It may not have the cachet that it did in the 1940s and 1950s, but aficionados continue to hold jazz in high regard. Its practitioners are superlative instrumentalists and, of course, improvisers, and in a world saturated with TikTok and social media and depressingly distinguished by ever-shorter attention spans, jazz is a euphoric and fulfilling, and sometimes challenging, medium for listeners and players alike.
“As recorded music becomes more and more devalued because people don’t necessarily consume their music by going out and buying it,” O’Connell said, “live music becomes a more important outlet. Which, in a way, is not terrible, because live music is the real thing anyway.”
The Jazz Fest, he said, “is diverse and represents many spectrums of jazz today. We’re growing, and we continue toward our goal to bring great jazz to the Hamptons.”
