Next came a long love fest in which Berklee and BeanTown officials commandeered the stage to pat one another's backs and accept oversize checks from the event's leading sponsors. That commercial interruption lasted nearly as long as the headliner performed.
Tyner -- far and away the biggest name to play the festival to date -- was clearly upset about something, most likely the inaudible stage monitor that caused him to leave his piano bench during his first tune and gesticulate toward someone offstage. Tyner wound up snipping off his planned 90 minutes in about half that time, much to the consternation of the WGBH-FM (89.7) crew that was broadcasting the show live. Tyner was coaxed back onstage for a pair of what passed for encores, but his set wound up lasting less than an hour.
That wasn't the only problem with it, either. Donald Harrison missed a flight and didn't show up, and the band's other three all-star horn players -- Dave Liebman, Wallace Roney, and Steve Turre -- might as well not have . They played well when they made it onstage, but Tyner only let them play on one tune. The rest of the time he either played solo or with his trio, the very same trio that Tyner's relentless touring brings to the Regattabar every few months. It's a terrific group, to be sure, but the promise of the horns adding something special for BeanTown was mostly broken.
Saturday, though, the hope of a first-rate jazz festival for Boston took a huge step toward fulfillment. Bona fide jazz is finally taking over , and for the first time festival goers had the sort of hard choices people have to make at Newport and other top multi-stage festivals.
