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Newport Jazz Evokes Storied Artists, Assorted Humanity DAY 1
By Kevin C. Peterson
Newport, Rhode Island — The people who descend on Newport for its annual jazz festival are as varied as they are differentiated: Old men in shorts with rolled black socks. A young couple who glance at each other in fits of insecurity. A middle-aged African woman with a white boyfriend. A bounding child in her father’s alms. The smell of sand. Sea air. Two highly styled white women in their twenties, lightly perfumed, self-assured.
The cirrus clouds drift and are a translucent tent that block the sun in a veil, but still the sun radiates a blue warmth. Winds push slightly into the Narragansett Bay.
Just before noon the Fort Adams Stage abounds with the coordinated sound of the Darcey James Argue’s Secret Society. Their music bloom with sophisticated orchestration: a full band that blushes a cacophony of colors that give signal to the erudition and elegance of jazz — its manifest inner logics and its penchant to evoke sentiment as well as salvation.
Canadian-born, Darcy James Argue, captures precisely the music born in the sweltering environs of New Orleans, in and around Congo Square, resurrecting the memory of Buddy Bolden and Louie Armstrong, who would later take this sound to Chicago for an up-North urban reinterpretation our understanding of…
