[kn5HbAhnwc8_SPEAKER_05]: This next song is Mourning, not Moaning, just so you know. Thought of a morning that brings a day so gently and bathes the leaves of memories that fell so long ago. I still recall you in all these early hours. I were there once more to share a love lost long ago. Crassness of youth concluding only half of the truth exuding only one small percent of what I surely felt for you. And one morning that brought a day so gently, we set apart things of the heart and lost love long ago. Of a morning that brings a day so gently and bathes the leaves of memories that fell so long ago. I still recall you. ♪ In all these early hours ♪ ♪ Though I were there once more to share ♪ ♪ A love lost long ago ♪ ♪ Crassness of youth ♪ ♪ Concluding only half of the truth ♪ ♪ Exuding only one small person ♪ ♪ Of what I surely felt for you ♪ ♪ And then one morning ♪ ♪ That brought a day so gently ♪ ♪ We set apart things of the heart ♪ ♪ And lost love long ago ♪ ♪ And lost love long ago ♪ And lost love, lost love, lost love. Thank you so much. Again, that was Mourning by Claire Fisher. This next song is by someone you may be familiar with, Donald Fagen, famous for, not really to Jonathan as far as I know, but different spelling I think, but famous for being a part of Steely Dan of course, founder of Steely Dan. A shadow crossed the blue Miami sky as we hit the causeway by the big hotels. We fought. Now I can't remember why. After all the words were said and tears were gone, we vowed we'd never say goodbye when we kissed. We could hear the sound of thunder as we watched the regulars rush the big hotels. We kissed again as the showers swept the Florida shore. You opened your umbrella, but we walked between the raindrops back to your door. We walked between the raindrops back to your door. Oh, Miami. In my dreams, I can hear the sound of thunder. I can see the causeway by the big hotels. That happy day, we'll find each other on that Florida shore. You'll open your umbrella and we'll walk between the raindrops back to your door. You'll walk between the raindrops, between the raindrops, walk between the raindrops back to your door. Thank you so much. By the way, that was Nardis, and this next song is called Star Eyes. Star eyes, that to me is what your eyes are. Soft as stars in April skies are. Tell me someday you'll fulfill their promise of a thrill. Star eyes, flashing eyes in which my hopes rise. Let me show you where my heart lies. Let me prove that it adores that loveliness of yours. All my life I felt content to stargaze at the sky. Now I only want to melt the stardust in your eyes, star eyes. When, if ever, will my lips know if it's me for whom those eyes glow? Makes no difference where you are. Your eyes still hold my wishing star. Oh, star eyes, how lovely you are. Star eyes, that to me is what your eyes are. Soft as stars in April skies are. Tell me someday you'll fulfill their promise of a thrill. Star eyes, flashing eyes in which my hopes rise. Let me show you where my heart lies. Let me prove that it adores That loveliness of yours All my life I've felt I'm tapped to stargaze at the skies. Now I only want to melt the stardust in your eyes. Star eyes, when if ever will my lips know? If it's me, for whom those eyes glow? Makes no difference where you are. Your eyes still hold my wishing star. Oh, star eyes, how lovely you are. Thank you. This next song is entitled Vertigo, coincidentally enough. It's written by John Abercrombie. This next song is written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Let's see if you recognize it. Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near? Just like me, they long to be close to you. Why do stars fall down from the sky every time you walk by? Just like me, they long to be close to you. On the day that you were born, the angels got together and decided to create a dream come true. So they sprinkled moon dust in your hair, a golden starlight in your eyes of blue. That is why all the girls in town follow you. all around. Just like me, they long to be close to you. On the day that you were born, the angels got together and decided to create a dream come true. So they sprinkle moon dust in your hair of gold and starlight in your eyes of blue. That is why all the girls in town follow you. All around. Just like me, they long to be close to you. Just like me, they long to be close to you. Close to you. I'm close to you. I'm close to you.
[Unidentified]: close to you.
[kn5HbAhnwc8_SPEAKER_05]: Thanks. Thanks for singing along. That was great. Okay, we've got one more tune we're gonna do. It's another take on an old, old, old song. Once I had a secret love that lived within the heart of me. All too soon my secret love became impatient to be free. And so I told a friendly star, the way that dreamers often do, just how wonderful you are and why I'm so in love with you. I shouted from the highest hills, even told the golden daffodils. At last, my heart's an open door, and my secret love's no secret anymore. Now I shout it from the highest hills. I even told the golden daffodils. At last, my heart's an open door. And my secret love's no secret anymore. Once I had a secret love. Once I had a secret love. Thank you so much. While I'm thanking you, I wanna give out some thanks to the Medford Jazz Festival, especially Jonathan Fagan, and all the volunteers. Thank you, Terry Carter, for hosting us, West Medford Community Center. Thank you, everybody, for being here. And I'm gonna quickly introduce everybody. Tim Blackman on keyboard. Ethan Folk on bass. Doug Tolan on drums. I'm Debbie Lane. Thank you so much. We're doing something else here. What are we doing? One more tune, guys. This is a song by McCoy Tyner. We meet and it begins, the sound of violins, the song of birds high on the wing. You taught my heart to sing. Why does this heart of mine feel like a valentine? You smile and suddenly it's spring. You taught my heart to sing. My heart was an empty shell. Then you came along. Now my heart's a carousel. A miracle of you will last my whole life through. You're all I keep remembering. You taught my heart to sing. My heart was an empty shell, then you came along. Now my heart's a carousel filled with song. The miracle of you will last my whole life through. You're all I keep remembering. You taught my heart to sing. You taught my heart to sing. You taught my heart to sing. Ba-da-da-da-ya-da. Ba-da-da-da-ya-da. Ba-da-da-da-ya-da. You taught my heart to sing. Thanks again, everybody. Thank you, Medford Jazz Festival.
[Terry Carter]: Good evening, everyone. Really, really happy to have you here at the West Medford Community Center. My name is Terry Cotter, and I manage elder services and do some special projects here at the community center. And if you look around you, you can see on the top portion of the walls what's called the West Medford Elder Photo Project. And these are folks that been shaking and moving in the community for many, many years. And then on the lower portion behind the plexiglass is the Afro-American Remembrance Project. West Medford is Medford's historically black community going back to the 1900s, early 1900s. And it's really, really special for us to have the Jazz Festival here because we have a musical history that in many cities of Massachusetts is very much envied. Terry Lynn Carrington grew up on Sharon Street, just a few streets over. Alan Dawson, who was Dave Brubeck's favorite drummer, he lived on these streets as well. And the Boston Jazz Society, which brought the best jazz players in America to the area, used to hold meetings on Sharon Street and on Monument Street. Medford has an amazing jazz tradition. Tomorrow we'll be out back with Mina Cho and her small ensemble and Farai Malik. I met Farai at Somerville Community Baptist Church when she was actually singing in a choir in a in a concert that they have every year there at SEBC. And so she's a delight, and she'll be here tomorrow as well. And then on Sunday, we have a couple of additional bands that will be playing, including the group that Jonathan Fagan and I front, which is the Ally Project, consisting of Jonathan, myself, our drummer who's sitting in the audience, Gordon Engelgau, and a fabulous bassist by the name of Greg Toro. So if you're free, you know, come and see us. Now, we're free, but we're not cheap. So, if you have a chance, you know, to make a donation, there's a red tin up front, you know, if you want to drop a little bit of coin in that. Not the kind that jingles, the kind that folds. We'll be more than happy to to accommodate your donations. We're gonna get started with our next group very soon. Just giving them a few minutes to get themselves together. We really appreciate you being here this evening. West Medford Community Center has become kind of a haven for jazz, music, music in general. We have a program starting back up in September called Fresh Fridays, Words and Music. We do an hour of moderated talk, and then we do an hour of live music. We're happy to have Medford Community Media with us. They always broadcast our programs on our Fresh Fridays. And we're really, really blessed to have Jonathan's dad, Avi Fagan here, who's helping us with the sound so everything is coming together the way it should. We have a lot of friends that come and play here. We have folks that come from Berklee's Institute of Jazz for Gender Justice, which Terry Lynn Carrington directs these days, and then we have many folks from Berklee's Institute, Global Jazz Institute, which is headed up by Danilo Perez, an internationally famous band leader and concert producer, internationally. And his students have become some of our folks that come and play for us. And that's no different from tonight. So you're getting ready to listen to the Reese Pike Trio. Reese has been here before. She's played in this building before, and she's also a big connector in terms of the Medford Jazz Festival. And her trio, she's on piano, Seba Ramirez is on drums, getting ready, and Jan Portisch is back here. He's gonna be playing the bass. And these musicians did indeed come together at Berklee's Global Jazz Institute And they all bring different influences from their home countries to the music. So you maybe get something that's a little bit Eurocentric. You'll certainly get something that's a little bit Latin-flavored, maybe a lot Latin-flavored. Reese has done a lot of her own composing while at the Global Institute. So a lot of the tunes that you hear will be original tunes. They'll play a few standards as well. How you doing? All right? You doing good, you know? Because I'm filling as fast as I can up here. But great musicians, great stories all, and we know that you're going to enjoy it. So I'm going to get out the way, and Reese Pike and her trio is going to take over. I'm just going to bring this mic over so she can use it.
[CgcJaOBCrh8_SPEAKER_01]: We're just going to take a couple seconds to warm up. So feel free to ignore us for a moment. Thank you very much. The first tune was I Feel Pretty from West Side Story. I have always, I love the music from West Side Story. It was one of the first times that I really fell in love with all of the music for my musical, but I've never liked that one song. So I always like to do it a little bit differently. Thank you so much for being here. We're really excited to be here at the Medford Jazz Fest on this first night. We're going to do another song from West Side Story, which is one of my favorites and of course one of the most classics. So we're going to do Somewhere before we switch over to some originals. So this next piece is going to be a little different. This is the first piece. As Terry mentioned, we all sort of came together at the Berkeley Global Jazz Institute, and I just graduated from there in June. But the next few pieces are from my thesis project. And I'll just share a little bit about my project. My project focuses on the life of Mexican-American composer Maria Grieber, who was very fascinating. She was a child prodigy and studied with WC. Then she married an American oil baron. Eventually, she left Mexico and moved to New York City as a single mom in 1916. and went on to write for MGM, for many, many movies. She had a very famous concert at Carnegie Hall. You may know What a Difference a Day Makes. That's actually her song. It's originally Cuando Vuelvo a Tu Lado. And so I was really interested in her story, and I sort of started thinking about how she had been so famous, and now very few people, at least here in the United States, know her name. And so I really wanted to write music that was inspired by her perseverance and also that connects to my own family history. And so these next couple pieces will have bolero influences in addition to music from my own background. So that piece was titled Vivo en el olvido, which translates to I live in the forgetting. And one of the really fun things about working on this project is that most of these songs have lyrics and I usually put them with singers. One of my favorite parts is that my mom wrote the lyrics. So I'm not going to sing tonight because nobody wants to hear that. But if you are curious, about hearing these songs with singers. I'm working on recording an album and also trying to perform these songs in other places, so follow along if you're interested. This next piece that we're going to play is the last one from the set, and this one is called El Sueño, which means the dream. And the lyrics for this one, which they're by a poet named Anabel López, who is a contemporary Mexican poet. And she passed just a few months ago. So I'm going to read the poem in Spanish. So just enjoy the sounds.
[SPEAKER_02]: Cuando no había luz ni agua, ni sombras porque no había luz ni agua, ni sol porque no había luna, ni mares porque no había agua, ni luz ni árboles porque no había pájaros, ni cielo porque no había tierra, ni luz porque no había fuego, ni calor porque no había luz, ni agua, ni tierra, ni fuego. Había un sueño dormido, esperando el azul del cielo.
[CgcJaOBCrh8_SPEAKER_01]: So the last few lines of the poem are translating to, essentially, before there was anything in the world, there was a dream waiting for the blue of the sky. Before we go on, I want to introduce my band again. It's so much fun to play with these guys. So we have Jan Portish on bass and Seba Ramirez on drums. And I also want to share we have some special guests in the audience tonight. Seba's parents are here visiting all the way from Paraguay. So a special thank you to them. Nuestros invitados especiales. Gracias por venir a su concierto. And this next piece is called Blues for Simone, which is for my cat, Simone. She was a really, really lazy cat. So we hope you get that feeling from this piece. And this next piece is going to be our last song for tonight. So we wanted to say thank you again so much to Jonathan and to everyone and to Terry and to get everyone who is part of the Medford Jazz Festival. I have really loved. I only moved to Boston, actually. The Medford Jazz Festival was probably my third week in Boston last year, so it's a very special experience for me, and it's been great to be part of such a welcoming community, and we really love playing here. Anytime we get a chance to be at the West Medford Community Center, it's always exciting. So this last piece that we're going to play is a song that I wrote. I studied abroad in Santiago, Chile. So I lived there for about five months. And while I was there, I happened to join a choir. And it was really beautiful. So I wrote a song when I was thinking about that. So thank you very much again for being here and we'd like to share this last piece with you. Thank you very much, Jan Portish and Seba Ramirez, and I am Reese Pike.
[Jonathan Fagan]: Thank you so much again to Reese Pike, Jan Portish, and Seba Ramirez. That was such a beautiful way to end the night and such a great preview of some of the influences to come, too. Really appreciate you sharing your talents and your time and all of the, yeah, just such a thoughtful and varied program, too, for everything. And thank you also to the Vertigo Trio, who's still sitting around here. To Terry Carter and the West Medford Community Center for supporting us this whole weekend. Avi Fagan over there on the sound. And of course to Medford Community Media, Kevin Harrington and Jim and Bruce over there. So if you like what you heard or you just want to hear something different, come back tomorrow. We'll be outside on the patio. And please donate if you are able, if you haven't already. Shayla's waving the big red box over there just to make sure that you know where it goes. We take Venmo. You can sign up for our Patreon as well. And consider buying a t-shirt. We have these beautiful new mint green this year as well, if you haven't seen those already. We'll also be joined by a couple of vendors tomorrow, Danish Pastry House. Oh, Terry's modeling T-shirts for you, so you can make sure to get one of those. Danish Pastry House, so come early with an appetite, ideally. And also, we've got our first apparel vendor this year, an elephant in the room. They're going to be just showcasing some new designs here. So come check it out, and have a great evening. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, 1 p.m. tomorrow.