TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK MONTREAL

“I have to say,” George Wein told his audience at the Theatre St. Denis, “that this is one of the truly great festivals in the world today.”

Self-congratulation? An ego trip on the part of the veteran producer who brought us the New York, Newport, Playboy, Nice and scores of other festivals around the world?

On the contrary. Wein, a man who welcomes competition, has nothing to do with the Festival International de Jazz de Montreal. He is here wearing his other hat, simply playing piano and leading his Newport All-Stars, a seven-piece swing band.

His assessment of the 10 days that shook this city is well grounded in fact. No other event has the special advantages one finds here. Imagine, if you can, an area from Vine Street to Highland Avenue and from Hollywood Boulevard to Selma Avenue blocked off to vehicular traffic; tens of thousands of fans milling around in the streets, listening to concerts on sidewalk bandstands or visiting one of several theaters in the area given over to performances by world-class names.

That is the counterpart for what happens here. From noon to midnight daily, close to a thousand musicians have taken part in about 150 indoor paid concerts or free outdoor events.

In New York, you get a series of concerts; here you have a happening. Add to this the bilingual ambiance, the Francophones (as they call themselves) mingling amicably with the Anglophones; toss in a musical cast that involves hundreds of Americans, hundreds of Canadians, dozens more from France, Scandinavia and all over Europe (among them the Soviet pianist Leonid Chizhik), and you have a heady mixture, with only one problem: This time around, the eighth year of the festival, it rained off and on for several days, forcing postponement of many outdoor concerts.

Most of the heavy action took place in the theaters, with the inevitable conflicts of overlap: If you wanted to catch the estimable Canadian pianist Oliver Jones and his quartet, you had to pass up Dave Brubeck with the Montreal Symphony. If you hadn’t heard the unique, veiled voice of Helen Merrill lately, you caught her at the Spectrum (a large cabaret-style theater) and missed the Joe Williams show.

Having arrived late (Montreal’s first three days are always New York’s closing weekend), I missed Dexter Gordon with his “ ‘Round Midnight” group, Gil Evans’ band and others; yet it was possible to be exposed in rapid succession to more important attractions, known and unknown, than can normally be found within such a compact, controlled area. (There are eight main concert halls, all within a five-minute bus ride and most within walking distance of one another.)

The Montreal talent roster often duplicated New York’s: McCoy Tyner, Ella Fitzgerald, Diane Schuur, Mel Lewis, Wynton Marsalis, John Scofield and others played both cities. Far more, however, were presented in one or the other, and the Canadians were exclusively heard here.

Oliver Jones is a strangely late bloomer. Born here in 1934, he studied with the classical piano teacher Daisy Peterson, Oscar’s sister, but resigned himself to a career of Top 40 and pop jobs, accompanying a Jamaican singer and living in Puerto Rico for 16 years. Not until he settled back in Montreal in 1980 was he persuaded that he could make a living playing jazz.

Though stylistically unlike Oscar Peterson, Jones shares his immense capacity for swinging and for harmonic finesse. The group he led could have been called the Trans-Canada Quartet, since he and the phenomenal bassist Michel Donato are Montrealers, while the Getz-like tenor saxophonist Fraser MacPherson and the guitarist Oliver Gannon are Vancouver-based.

Making up for lost time, Jones has toured Europe and Japan, drew warm reviews in New York, but has yet to play Los Angeles. He is certain to be established soon as Canada’s greatest gift to jazz since Peterson himself. Man for man, the quartet he led here, at a University of Quebec auditorium, was uniformly impeccable.

The enthusiasm shown for Jones contrasted poignantly with the reaction, in the same hall the previous evening, to Phineas Newborn Jr. Once hailed as second only to Peterson, the Memphis pianist has suffered many years of emotional illness. On this occasion, he was less than a shadow of his early self; it seemed painful for him to reach for a chord, as if he were climbing up a staircase in the dark. Flashes of his old genius were aborted after a few moments; he stumbled through several numbers at a dirge-like pace, rarely even setting a tempo. The audience began walking out. After less than 40 minutes, Newborn called it a night. For anyone who knew and revered him in the 1960s, this was an agonizing experience.

One of the wildest receptions of the week was accorded to Bobby McFerrin, whose vocal gymnastics are as astonishing as ever. But McFerrin now devotes much of his time to such antics as crawling and jumping around, leaping off the stage to mingle with the audience, inviting as many as 30 volunteers out of the house to join him in a sing-along. When he wound up coaching the crowd into a joint vocal on the Mickey Mouse Club song, it became all too clear that his success is driving him down the slippery slope from musical integrity and innovation to the unwonderful world of show business.

Trumpeter Terence Blanchard and alto saxophonist Donald Harrison have backgrounds much like that of Wynton and Branford Marsalis; they too studied with Ellis Marsalis at the latter’s school in New Orleans, and later replaced the Marsalises in Art Blakey’s band. They now head a quintet with a florid but engaging young pianist, Cyrus Chestnut. Harrison is the man to watch here: He seems to feel instinctively the art of building a long solo forward, upward and outward, to great emotional effect.

After a lengthy investigation of “All Blues,” Harrison announced: “That was written by Miles Davis when he was a jazz musician.” Next came “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise,” which again ran to 20 minutes. Too many musicians in this age bracket fail to understand the virtues of succinctness.

Horace Silver’s quintet has the same instrumentation but his sidemen, in a vibrant show at the Theatre St. Denis, found more to say in a better-disciplined context. Various instrumental works, some in 5/4 and 3/4, were followed by vocal versions (with Andy Bey singing persuasively) of such old pieces of Silver as “Senor Blues,” “Nica’s Dream” and “Cape Verdean Blues” (now retitled “Samba Caribbean” with lyrics by Steve Allen).

At the Club Soda, a handsome black singer, Ranee Lee, New York born but long considered one of Montreal’s own, has become the city’s most talked-about hit with a nightly one-woman show, “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill.” Loosely based on the story of Billie Holiday four months before her death in 1959, it is a bit long on dramatic monologues (written by Lanie Robertson), but Lee, in a demanding two-hour show punctuated by 17 songs (in which she achieves the soulful essence without attempting to duplicate the actual timbre of Lady Day) makes it a moving experience, one that deserves exposure in other cities.

French artists (as well as French-Canadians) being special favorites here, it was no surprise that Helen Merrill, whose latest album was a hit in France, earned a standing ovation at the Spectrum in a program of superbly-chosen songs (but does everyone have to include “ ‘Round Midnight”?). Nor did it hurt that for her encore she sang “I Love Paris” partly in French.

On a more visual than aural level, the French sensation was Urban Sax, a sort of avant-garde space show from Paris, with dozens of saxophonists and a company numbering about 50, known for wild lighting and costumes, dancers and acrobats. Urban Sax drew an estimated 40,000 to the street area where it performed on July 1, Canada Day (a national holiday). I tried to see it but couldn’t get close.

It was much easier to gain access to a matinee by Andre White, a young Canadian pianist whose roots are so clearly in Bud Powell that it came as no surprise to hear him ease into a Powell original, “Reets and I.” White’s trio seemed to reflect a growing tendency among young jazzmen toward early, carefully guarded roots.

Jim Hall and Ron Carter, the guitar-and-bass duo, provided what may have been the most graceful and sensitive music of the entire week. To Hermeto Pascoal, that strange, multi-instrumental Brazilian albino, whose band roared through its thunderous blues/rock motions, went the dubious honor of providing the most violent contrast to all the values Hall and Carter hold dear.

One evening, as I was threading my way through the almost impenetrable crowd that jammed the Rue St. Denis, I stopped to hear a French-Canadian blues band. The harmonica player seemed to be the leader, and the language seemed to be English, though at that level of distortion and volume it could have been Urdu. But everyone seemed happy, just as those of us examining the subtler sounds had been satisfied throughout this relentlessly eventful week. To producer Alain Simard, who may yet earn a reputation as the George Wein of Canada, I offer mes felicitations les plus sinceres .