Michael Reckord, Gleaner Writer

Jodian Pantry - photos by Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer

Being planned to run over the next three years is a series of activities marking the centenary of the Holy Trinity Cathedral on North Street, Kingston. One in the series was held at the Archbishop's Residence on Sunday.

It was an Evening of Jazz, and it featured a number of classy practitioners of the genre, some instrumentalists, some singers. The headline act was by the inter-nationally recognised Jamaican born trumpeter Dizzy Reece, who nevertheless was not placed in the concert's climactic position.

In their wisdom, the pro-gramme's organisers left that to a singer. They could hardly have chosen a more entertaining one than Karen Smith, who was described by the MC for the evening, the silky smooth Michael Anthony Cuffe, as "one of the finest in the Caribbean".

Other performers were Jodian Pantry, who got spotlighted as a singer during a Rising Stars competition, veteran trumpeter Mickey Hanson, the Kingsley Depasse Trio and Desi Jones and the Skool Band.

The band included Jones, the leader, on drums, Christopher McDonald and Othneil Lewis on keyboard, Rohan Reid on guitar and Haslam on bass.

Music lovers, especially jazz aficionados, will recognise all those names; they are well known. Unfortunately, those same fans stayed away in droves.

Five hundred to 600 chairs were placed on the residence's spacious lawns, space was reserved for parking at nearby Campion College and three buses were hired to shuttle patrons from the school to the venue. Tasty food and drink was available from tents and tables on the periphery of the grounds.

But all this effort resulted in only half of the chairs being filled. There was, I gathered, a competing event at a New Kingston hotel, and, in fact, Smith sang at both places.

What money was made, though, was to go to the Cathedral Restoration project, which began in January. That project, the emcee told the audience, was part of the Downtown Kingston Restoration project now under way.

National Heritage site

The cathedral is a National Heritage site and the restoration project is planed as an international collaborative effort. Participants will include experts from Spain, the HEART Trust, teachers and students from the Edna Manley College's School of Art and others. A focus will be the beautiful mural on the church's inner walls and ceiling.

The concert, which started at 7:45 p.m. and ended exactly three hours later, started off with Skool playing three up-tempo numbers. They included On Broadway and Footprints.

Kingsley Depass and his trio came onstage next. The violin, played by Depass, made instrumental make-up of the ensemble an unusual one and gave the items a slight country music sound. Other instruments were bass (played by the leader's brother) and keyboard (André Campbell). Their well-received, beautifully executed numbers included My Favourite Things and Sweet Georgia Brown.

Delight

Dizzy Reece

Hanson, whose youthful appearance belies his claims that he has been playing the trumpet for 40 years (and he was also a stage and radio actor), delighted his listeners with his four items. They were Cantelope, The Gift, Sandu and the ethereal Land of Make Believe.

Just before the break at 9:10 p.m., Pantry made an auspicious debut as a jazz singer with a sassy rendition of Summer Time. The emcee's words of congratulations, combined with the audience's applause, may well propel her further into the field.

Reece, who made his professional debut as an instrumentalist at 14, is also a composer-arranger and a writer. He has written articles, poems, stories and screenplays (unpublished). In 1978, he organised and produced the first Annual New York city Jazz Festival.

Placed as the penultimate performer, Reece, dressed in a black suit and black beret, generally speaking played cool, relaxed jazz. Much of the time it was downright melancholy, as with Round About Midnight, his second number. Always in perfect control of his notes, he apparently effortlessly allowed them to come pouring from his instrument - a stream of water over pebbles.

Fever

But Karen Smith was more exciting. She walked onstage wearing a white dress and singing On A Clear Day. Slow or fast, she could do no wrong; the audience loved her - loved her singing, her smile, her patter, her ebullient personality.

She was sultry and finger snapping in Fever, bouncy and merry with That's Life, spiritual in her duet with McDonald as they performed So We'll Be Safe. Her final up beat number, All of Me, sent her fans home in an appropriately upbeat mood.

Future fundraisers will doubtless bring in more money for the restoration of the cathedral; the organisers may not get another function that is more entertaining.