Comments (0) Best Improbably Enormous Downtown Jazz Festival - 2010
Winter Jazzfest
It's yet another dismaying frigid January weekend, with no one with an ounce of good sense daring to stray more than 10 feet from the warming light of his or her flat-screen TV, and yet a small pocket of the Village is teeming with enthusiastic live-music fans, shuffling briskly but happily from (le) poisson rouge to Kenny's Castaways to Sullivan Hall to Zinc Bar and back again, all in the name of . . . jazz? Yes, this year's Winter Jazzfest was a smashing success. The six-year-old institution (begun at the old Knitting Factory) broke out in a big way in 2010, parading several dozen adventurous downtown-jazz luminaries (Darcy James Argue, Vijay Iyer, Mary Halvorson) over two nights in front of a couple thousand (!) adventurous fans, new and old. Aided mightily by ambitious promoter cabals like Search & Restore and Revive Da Live, the two-day fete has now inspired spin-offs like June's similarly packed Undead Jazzfest, but, hell, anyone can draw a crowd then. Nothing warms the heart quite like a winter-coat-bearing capacity crowd at Kenny's Castaways ready for a challenge, defying the odds simply by being there, listening.
