Good news is that Rob Wells went to the Newport Jazz Festival this year. He's the host of Jazz Scoop Saturday nights on KUAF. If bad news is the festival ended, probably before Rob wanted it to.
Wells: Oh, I tell you, it's an endurance test. I mean, three days, you know, 52 bands.
Kellams: But somehow you persevered.
Wells: I did, I did. I mean, you know, these are my people. I have such a great time. And then I'm up there with some wonderful friends. It was just, it was fantastic.
Kellams: We'll be hearing also about this throughout the coming weeks and months on the Jazz Scoop Saturday night on KUAF.
Wells: Right. I did quite a few interviews. And so I'm going to be, you know, rolling those out in the coming weeks. You know, just kind of hitting the highlights here, but I've talked to quite a few people and gathered a lot of new music. So we're going to be rolling on the Jazz Scoop for sure.
Kellams: All right. Tell me about the festival, 2026 version.
Wells: Well, I think the theme this year, Kyle, is this term jazz adjacent.
Kellams: Well, when you have Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers as one of the main acts, the festival is jazz adjacent.
Wells: Even before the festival started, we encountered, I think, the feel good story for the summer of 2026.
Kellams: Okay, and that is?
Wells: So I take a ferry over to the jazz festival and the event is on this beautiful park, right on the water. And I sit down with my friend Melody, and there are these three young people across from us. And one guy is kind of striking. He's kind of pale. He's got long black hair, he's wearing black wingtip shoes with white socks and shorts, and he's got a Vulfpeck T-shirt. His name is Dakota Burr, and he told me that they had just driven in from Flint, Michigan.
Kellams: Oh.
Wells: And with him was Maria Mitchell, who works with Dakota on the overnight shift in a factory. And here she is talking about that trip.
"But yeah, I'm from Michigan and I came here with these little two knuckleheads on the drive. Freaking what, 13 hours, 14 hours drive? Man, it was something."
Wells: They could have been husband and wife, I swear to God. And Maria is standing at the bow and she's just mesmerized by the whole scene. I mean, it's a beautiful morning, you know, and the boat's leaving the dock and she's looking at the wave and she's crying. Maria had never seen the ocean before.
Kellams: Yeah.
"I grew up in, raised in Detroit. So my family didn't do stuff like this. We kind of just, you know, we just, there we just trying to survive. But no, I've never been on a boat. And I was trying not to be emotional about it, but I was just like, I'm so overwhelmed. I'm like, it's so much like this. The view is very beautiful. It's very, almost magical, really. Everything is very vibrant. The sun is shining so beautifully and the waves just. It's just breathtaking."
Wells: I tell you, it really is. And so Dakota gets up to comfort her and says, hey, dude, look at the waves. That's sick. And he tells me that he and Maria actually have a pretty good time on this overnight shift at the factory.
"The company that we work for, they allow us to bring in speakers and they let us play whatever we want. There's no holds barred. They don't have any restrictions. They just say, don't play stuff that's like too inappropriate."
"Okay, so what do you play?"
"I play a mixture of punk, jazz, progressive rock. Honestly, it can really go anywhere. I mean, I go in there and I just play music that I found and I like."
Wells: So they were all excited to see Vulfpeck, which got its start at the University of Michigan. So it's sort of a Michigan band of sorts. But the third person in this group was Wes Gaines, and he's a drummer, and he wanted to see Bernard Purdie, you know, legendary drummer. And he had a list of bands he wanted to see, but he was also looking forward to something else.
"Anything, any musician, any artist, any group that I did not know about, where I see them, I'm like, oh my God."
Kellams: Well, let's talk about who you saw.
Wells: Well, you know, some amazing performances. You know, Lake Street Dive was one of the headliners and they were just so fun and upbeat. There was such a polished band, but they're kind of loose at the same time. And Robert Glasper was a big hit. This man is just incredibly sophisticated with his blend of hip hop, soul and jazz. I even saw like a major jazz artist, Jason Moran, the pianist. He was on the side of the stage checking out Robert Glasper.
Kellams: That's fun.
Wells: That was kind of cool. Thundercat, you know, I'd seen him before, but boy, this guy was incredible. His bass playing was like Charlie Parker on the saxophone. Oh, he was just so fast and fluid. And he's a great songwriter and singer. Really tight bond with the crowd. I'm very lucky to see him.
And then, you know, more of a traditional jazz vocalist was Michael Mayo and really upbeat performance. This was his first year leading a band at Newport. He's 34 years old. There aren't really a lot of male vocalists, jazz vocalists, you know.
Kellams: All right, I want to hear more about this jazz adjacency that you talked about. You said the theme was jazz adjacent.
Wells: Yeah. So, you know, the Newport Jazz Festival doesn't have like the traditional big bands or the bebop sessions that they used to have all the time. There are a couple here and there, but it really isn't dominated by that. But the festival is growing and it's expanding and it sells out like in a week. So the programming is very popular. You know, about 10,000 people show up.
And probably the best example of this jazz adjacent thing was this supergroup called Atomic Habitz. And so you have a bassist named MonoNeon who's a funk player, and then you have a jazz and gospel and hip hop drummer named Chris Dave. And then you have a southern rock country star, Marcus King. I'm calling this band the end of all musical genres, you know? And it was great. They were really, really good. Marcus King's got a great voice. Check it out.'
[Music: Atomic Habitz]
Kellams: So that's Marcus King on vocals that we just heard.
Wells: Yeah, that's Marcus King. He's the singer, and then Chris Dave on drums and on bass. Many thanks to MonoNeon for posting this on your Facebook page.
So I asked a number of the artists about this jazz adjacent thing, and Greg Bryant, bass player of Concurrence, a band that opened the festival on Friday. And here's what he had to say about the whole jazz adjacent idea.
"I think the implosion of the record business, or how we used to know it, was very helpful in that, because I think people always wanted to cross pollinate, play with each other and not have the, you know, structures of I've got a contract over here and you got a contract with this one and you're known on this festival circuit and you're known in these clubs. Artists have always wanted to blend, I think. And now that that has imploded, I think it's made it much easier to come together."
Kellams: Okay. You mentioned both when we did the preview and earlier in this conversation, that Flea, who of course was a pivotal member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flea, was there.
Wells: I just, you know, I wasn't really kind of sold on the idea of Flea at first. I heard his jazz album, I love Flea, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I think he's brilliant, brilliant rock bassist, just one of the best ever. But you know, his original instrument is trumpet. And he put out a jazz album this year. And he was kind of like everywhere.
So Jon Batiste has a set where he's doing trios unannounced. Who is going to be in the trio, and Flea shows up to play with Jon Batiste, plays on trumpet, and then the two of them go into this insane funk jazz jam that was really, really one for the ages. And the Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith was on stage with him. So here's a little taste of what that sounded like.
[Music: Jon Batiste with Flea]
Kellams: I guess that was. Well, it was intended to be a surprise, right? You didn't know who was going to be in this trio. Anything else surprise you?
Wells: Oh, yeah. For sure. Quite a bit. Quite a bit. So one was this South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini. And he opened the festival on Sunday. Nduduzo has a PhD in music. He's very philosophical. And he talked to me about the distinction between time and the clock.
Kellams: Okay.
Wells: And then we discussed the influence of Abdullah Ibrahim, the late South African pianist. And you can definitely hear that influence in this track from his new album, "The Myth We Choose."
[Music: "The Myth," Nduduzo Makhathini]
Wells: We just heard "The Myth" from the album "The Myth We Choose," Nduduzo, South African pianist. So I talked to him and he was just fascinating. And I asked, why did he use a sampler to bring in voices and sounds from South Africa during a set. And what he told me, I think, is the best justification I've ever heard for using a sampler.
"The whole idea of sampling is our ancestors were the voiceless, the invisible. And so every glimpse of the archive I can find, some of these is from Burundi, some of it from West Africa, some of it is from East Africa, some from South Africa. So I use the sampler to speak the language of my ancestors, basically.
"It collapses the conventional concept of time, of the past as something that has gone. It suggests that ancestors are alive. And all of these time concepts are in a collapse where the past is happening simultaneously with the future."
Wells: And again, you're going to hear many more cuts from interviews on the Jazz Scoop on Saturday nights coming up in the next weeks and months.
Kellams: Anyone else stand out to you?
Wells: Corey Fonville, the drummer for Butcher Brown. I think he kind of represented the spirit of the Newport Jazz Festival. Corey is, you know, he's the ... Butcher Brown is this fantastic funk band out of Virginia, and he was everywhere.
He played Friday with his band at a special post-festival event in Newport at a blues bar. And then he had another Butcher Brown gig Saturday at the festival. On Sunday, standing ovation for the trio. He had Fonville and Fribush organ trio. And then he sat in with Charlie Hunter, the guitarist, later on Sunday.
And I'm probably missing a couple of gigs, but I had a chance to talk to Corey Fonville, and actually, the interview was interrupted when one of the festival organizers came up to see if he could fill in for something else. There was a vocalist, Sienna Spiro, was ill, and Nate Smith was trying to get a gig together. So here is the Fonville and Fribush organ trio that opened the festival on Sunday. And the crowd really loved the sound. Let's check this out.
[Music: "Feel Like Making Love," Corey Fonville, Sam Fribush and Morgan Burrs]
Kellams: So that's Fonville and Fribush.
Wells: Fonville on drums, Sam Fribush on organ and Morgan Burrs on guitar. That was the Roberta Flack classic "Feel Like Making Love."
So Corey has, and Butcher Brown have just recorded a pretty major tribute to Miles Davis and John Coltrane with Nicholas Payton, the trumpeter, and Nicholas Payton was in Herbie Hancock's band later in the evening. This tribute album is part of this whole centenary celebration of Miles Davis and John Coltrane birthdays. And here's Corey Fonville discussing this new album that they recorded with Nicholas Payton called "Supreme Blue."
"This last about a year ago, we played at a venue in Boston. Nicholas was at the time working at Berklee College of Music, and so he came down and jammed with us on a song. It was a song we had called "Unwind," and it was a moment, I guess, that was captured on Instagram, on the story. And the guy put a supreme, a love, a Supreme House because Nicholas quoted "A Love Supreme" on the song. And so Nicholas saw that, and it sparked kind of like an idea for Nicholas. And then he had reached out to me pretty much that next day about, hey, I got this idea to do this record."
"Cool. Okay."
"And then, you know, we went in the studio in August and, you know, he had some sketches of like arrangements. He had arrangements, but, you know, we got in the studio and just hit record."
Kellams: And you have a cut from that.
Wells: I, you know, for folks who know the Miles Davis canon, let's check out "Freddie Freeloader" when Nicholas Payton and Butcher Brown get ahold of it.
[Music: "Freddie Freeloader," Nicholas Payton and Butcher Brown]
Kellams: And that's Nicholas Payton on trumpet and Butcher Brown. That's from. And again, the name of the album.
Wells: Oh, that's from "Supreme Blue."
Kellams: Gotcha.
Wells: Yeah. Brand new, brand new recording. So, yeah. The idea of taking house music and applying it to jazz.
Kellams: I love it, I love it.
Wells: It was great. So Nicholas Payton was on trumpet. He appeared on stage with Herbie Hancock, festival headliner. It was raining at that time.
Kellams: Mhm.
Wells: And Herbie Hancock comes out on stage. He's in his mid-80s and the crowd is yelling Herbie, Herbie, Herbie! And he just, he loved it. It was a big smile on his face. And he didn't disappoint. He played many of his hits, including "Watermelon Man" and "Chameleon."
So I'll end with another veteran musician who really touched all of us. And that was the drummer, Bernard Purdie. You know, he's a legendary musician. He's played on so many different albums and he brought to Newport this great soul and blues band, and they played all these crowd favorites like "Sunny" and "Feels Like Rain," you know, the John Hiatt classic. The front man was the harmonica player Rob Paparozzi. Have to thank my Jazz Scoop super fan, Janie Harris, for digging up that fact.
And the set, you know that Purdie had, he closed by playing the signature Purdie Shuffle, which is very complicated, rhythmic mixture that swings like nothing else. And he did it on a Steely Dan song called "Home at Last" from the "Aja" album. And so I thought this was appropriate because it was kind of a take, you know, "Home at Last" is all about Homer and the Odyssey.
Kellams: Oh yeah.
Wells: You know. Yeah. And that's one of the summer's blockbusters. And so Bernard Purdie took us home at last.
Kellams: Well, we're gonna go home with Bernard Purdie. But first I'll remind you that we've been talking with Rob Wells, host of the Jazz Scoop, heard every Saturday night at 10 on 91.3 KUAF. More Newport Jazz Festival reflections on that show through the weeks to come. Rob, we love listening vicariously through your experience. Thank you for going.
Wells: Well, thank you very much for having me. This was a great privilege and I love talking to you.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
