Joey DeFrancesco Trio & Regina Carter Quartet Double Bill at Healdsburg Jazz Festival at Jackson Theater

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With all he’s already accomplished in his 47 years, it’s perhaps not surprising that Joey DeFrancesco is striving for something bigger. He has already released close to 40 albums and played on 25 others. He has been gigging professionally since age 10, released his first record at 17, and right out of the gate attracted backup musicians like Illinois Jacquet, John Scofield, and Grover Washington Jr. As a teenager he went on the road with Miles Davis, and not much after formed a fierce trio with John McLaughlin and Dennis Chambers called The Free Spirits.
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Read More at the website:
With all he’s already accomplished in his 47 years, it’s perhaps not surprising that Joey DeFrancesco is striving for something bigger. He has already released close to 40 albums and played on 25 others. He has been gigging professionally since age 10, released his first record at 17, and right out of the gate attracted backup musicians like Illinois Jacquet, John Scofield, and Grover Washington Jr. As a teenager he went on the road with Miles Davis, and not much after formed a fierce trio with John McLaughlin and Dennis Chambers called The Free Spirits.

If Joey DeFrancesco’s lodestar is the universe, then so is violinist Regina Carter’s, but in her case, the universe happens to be a person. Namely, it’s Ella Fitzgerald. The transcendence that Regina and Joey both seek was unquestionably contained in the heart and soul of Ella. She was the cosmos, the force, the church and state, and when she opened her mouth to sing what came out was love. Regina’s show at Healdsburg, called Simply Ella – for which she will tap her recent album Ella: Accentuate the Positive – is a bit of a misnomer because what exactly is simple about Ella Fitzgerald?

Here’s one idea. Simple is the pure honesty with which Ella approached her music, whether the style was jazz, country, rhythm & blues, or pop. And this is where Regina takes her cue. She decided to interpret the music the way she feels it, and that means being true to Ella by being true to Regina’s own Detroit roots and the wildly eclectic career she has spun out of them, a career that spans straight-ahead and avant-garde jazz, Motown, funk, Paganini, paeans to the Deep South and Africa – and now Ella, the First Lady of Song. Along that 30-plus-year career path Regina established herself as one of the great violinists of jazz history and won a MacArthur “genius” grant.

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