Con Brio is having a moment. The San Francisco soul band landed the challenging and high profile assignment of opening up San Jose Jazz’s Summer Fest on the main stage Friday afternoon at the north end of the Plaza de Cesar Chavez. Ziek McCarter, Con Brio’s dynamic lead vocalist and snake-hipped guiding spirit, did his best to spark the weekend-long street party, and by the end of the 80-minute set he could be proud of a job well done.
Summer Fest kicks into frenzy mode around noon Saturday, with 13 stages and half a dozen acts performing simultaneously in venues and stages arrayed around the plaza through Sunday night. Friday’s more limited offerings set the mood for the proceedings.
A sleek and sinewy funk/disco combo that makes the most of its six-piece instrumentation, Con Brio rides on the buoyant crest of Benjamin Andrews’ relentlessly grooving rhythm guitar. With a beseeching tenor that floats effortlessly up to a silky smooth falsetto, McCarter occupies the uncrowded sweet-end of the soul vocal spectrum. Egalitarian in outlook and decidedly anti-materialist in sensibility, Con Brio purveys San Francisco R&B, though they’re half a hook away from breaking out of the Bay Area. The band’s best songs, like the anthem “Never Going to be the Same,” sound like half-forgotten hits from 1978 (the band’s moment continues this weekend when Con Brio opens for Morris Day and the Time at Stern Grove on Sunday afternoon).
Strolling down 1st Street, Summer Fest and San Jose’s First Friday street party converged for the first time, and the air was suddenly charged with the sound of pure rhumba. San Jose Jazz has always put Afro-Caribbean music at the center of the festival, but this was something new and extraordinary, as Cuban conguero Jesus Diaz led an all-star rhumba session from the back of SJZ Boom Box Stage (a box truck with the side cut out and painted to look like a giant boom box). It was like stumbling into a street corner gathering in Havana, with Diaz and vocalist Fito Reynoso delivering invocations accompanied by a conga battery including unbilled percussion master Michael Spiro
So where was the jazz happening? On Friday, the prime spot was also on First Street, where Café Stritch was in the midst of the third annual Rahsaanathon, a mini-festival that parallels but isn’t officially part of Summer Fest, and summons the spirit of the singular horn player, composer, and bandleader Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
Friday was the second of three nights featuring East Bay-raised trombonist Steve Turre, a fixture on the New York scene for some four decades who spent his formative years playing with Kirk on Bay Area stages. Turre has presented Kirk’s music around the world, but Café Stritch has quickly become his Rahsaanian homebase.
