Verizon Festival Ends on an Up Note

The ambitious effort by Verizon and Festival Productions to create a major early autumn music festival for Los Angeles came to a splendid close Tuesday night at the California Plaza.

One couldn’t have asked for a better setting or a better evening. The Plaza’s Water Court, with its artful fountains sending up picturesque cascades of water behind the performance stage, was further enhanced by the rising of a full moon in a gloriously clear Southern California sky.

Though the presence of Brazil’s Daniela Mercury, the original headliner, would have made for the perfect combination of artist and ambience, her cancellation was understandable, given recent travel conditions. Fortunately, Cameroon’s Richard Bona and the Brazilian power couple of Flora Purim and Airto Moreira did an impressive job of filling the gap.

Bona, who would be an important artist if he did nothing but concentrate on his virtuosic bass playing, is an equally gifted singer and songwriter. In his thoroughly entertaining set, those skills were smoothly integrated into a richly layered musical package.

Blending vocals (sung in Douala, the language of his Cameroonian homeland) with instrumental textures, mixing in his own bass solos as well as improvisations from his accomplished band members, Bona’s music offered a prototype model for a world jazz ensemble.

His past outings have tended to emphasize the more traditional music of Cameroon, but in this performance--reflecting the far-reaching sounds on his new album, “Reverence”--Bona reached out to embrace everything from the blues and Afro-Cuban rhythms to gentle African melodies and burning, Weather Report-like fusion.

Aided by a United Nations of stellar sidemen--saxophonist Aaron Heick, guitarist Oz Noy, keyboardist Etienne Stadwijk, percussionist Urbano Sanchez and drummer Nathaniel Townsley--Bona’s presentation was the highlight of the concert, a superb, musically equivalent bookend to the Verizon Festival’s opening-night performance by Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.

Frequent appearances in the Southland by Purim and Moreira have made their music familiar item to many local jazz fans. A few weeks ago, they performed at the Skirball Center, and they kick off a weeklong run at Catalina Bar & Grill on Oct. 16. Never less than intriguing, they served up their usual adroit blend of rhythmically diverse music, often roving through unusual meters, with Purim’s voice cruising easily above the instrumental passages.

As so often happens with this group, the showcase number in the set was an animated solo by Moreira, using his voice, the Brazilian pandeiro (or tambourine) and a police whistle to generate the sounds and energies of a virtual Brazilian samba school.

The Emerging Talent artists on the bill included the local group Wozani (led by singer-songwriter LamaKhosi Kunene) and Mexican balladeer Jorge Gamboa Patron.