special report

At last year's Panama Jazz Festival, it was not only this reviewer's opinion that the acts with top billing, even though they met all expectations of excellence, were eclipsed by other performers about whom few had heard before they played and from whom nearly everyone in the audience went away wanting to hear more. This year there were faint echoes of that surprise phenomenon, but by crowd response and the bulk of reasonable opinion Stanley Jordan, who had top billing, put on the best received show.

There were fewer bands on the Thursday and Friday night ATLAPA concerts than in prior years, and this year we didn't have the outstanding child and youth prodigies onstage at those events as in the past. It seems that the Thursday night show, like the opening night gala at the Teatro Nacional, also drew a somewhat smaller crowd than last year, but a much larger throng showed up to hear the Caribbean Jazz Project and Stanley Jordan on Friday.

The people who missed the Thursday night show missed a great one, "Ladies Night" as it were. Top billing for Thursday was Cat Russell, an excellent singer and Panamanian citizen by parentage if she cares to be who took the audience through standards and not so very well known goodies in the jazz, blues and soul idioms. This reporter grew up in a household that featured sounds by the likes of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitgerald, and then moved to Detroit in 1966, so that sort of music is known and appreciated and Russell's renditions were moving.

To this reporter, however, the warm-up band on Thurday, the Tia Fuller Quartet --- and particularly its drummer Kim Thompson --- stole that night's show. Saxophonist Fuller and Thompson are part of Beyoncé's traveling band and that in itself confers "world class" credentials. None of that really matters, though. The sounds they made on the stage would have marked them for what they are had they been complete unknowns from a nondescript section of the outer boonies.

On Friday night Dave Samuels began with a particularly inane speech about the US government not supporting the arts as compared to Panama doing so --- when the US Embassy is a festival co-sponsor and Ambassador Eaton was sitting in the third row, and at a time when more labor strife is brewing between the Torrijos administration and the teachers' unions over the government's steep cutbacks on public school music, art, phys ed and history instruction. It quickly got better, however, when the Caribbean Jazz Project started playing and he put his sticks to the vibraphones.

And then Stanley Jordan --- is there anything adequate that can be said or written? This reporter has in the course of his life caught concerts by Jimi Hendrix, Andrés Segovia, Eric Clapton, Luther Allison, Carlos Santana, Peter Townsend and Alvin Lee. None of those people have or had anything on Stanley Jordan. In fact the works of those masters were surely the canon that Jordan learned, before going several steps beyond in other directions. Jimi played behind his back and with his teeth --- and Stanley played guitar and piano at the same time. Santana makes his guitar cry --- and Jordan expresses a full spectrum of complex emotions with his instrument. Panama has been visited by one of the all-time greats even if it may take years for people to realize what happened.