‘Jump In the Line: Celebrating Harry Belafonte with René Marie’
Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Appel Room
Streaming Through November 2

While I was fortunate to see Harry Belafonte live several times, my favorite memory of him is during an appearance on the NBC TV series hosted by his close friend and one-time business partner, Nat King Cole. 

The year is 1957, a few months after the release of Belafonte’s blockbuster hit LP, “Calypso,” and his most successful single, “Day-O.” In the interim, the comedian Stan Freberg had come out with his parody record of “Day-O,” in which an exasperated beatnik bongo player tells the singer that his voice is “too piercing, man, too piercing.”  

On “The Nat King Cole Show,” Cole and Belafonte are in the middle of a comic duet when Belafonte turns to the host and says, “It’s too piercing, man, too piercing.” Clearly, Belafonte had enough of a sense of humor to appreciate even a take-off on his own most famous song.

Speaking of Belafonte, singer René Marie said accurately, “His sense of humor was so evident, you see the twinkle in his eyes.” Ms. Marie just starred in an excellent tribute to the great troubadour, who left us in 2023 at the age of 96. 

“Jump In the Line: Celebrating Harry Belafonte with René Marie” was a collaboration between the veteran vocalist and the trumpeter Etienne Charles. At 41, the Trinidad-born Mr. Charles is primarily known as a trumpeter and bandleader, but he also plays percussion, composes and arranges original music, and is a storied folklorist and educator.  

Like his older colleague, the formidable Jamaican pianist Monty Alexander, Mr. Charles is one of the world authorities on Caribbean music, especially with regard to its interaction with North American jazz. HIs ensemble this week co-starred trombonist Andrae Murchison, pianist Xavier Davis, guitarist Dan Wilson, bassist Rodney Jordan, and drummer Quentin E. Baxter.

For the Belafonte project, Ms. Marie and Mr. Charles thoughtfully reimagined a half dozen or so of the great singer’s calypsos, along with a few of his other folk songs. Ms. Marie is one of the few jazz singers who follows in the footsteps of the late Jon Hendricks, Oscar Brown Jr., and Abbey Lincoln in that, in recent decades especially, she mostly performs her own original works. While I’ll readily admit most of her own works are excellent, I also enjoy her performing existing songs. 

Working together, the two came up with a sound that’s roughly half René Marie, half Etienne Charles, and half Harry Belafonte — the math may not check out, but the music is terrific. This program makes concrete an idea from Louis Jordan’s 1946 R&B hit, “Push-Ka-Pee She Pie (The Saga Of Saga Boy),” in which he prophesied the coming of a new kind of music that he described as “the New Calypso Bebop.”  

The arrangements do full justice to both ends of the equation: They are indeed a highly copasetic blend of rhythms and sounds from Jamaica and Trinidad — calypso, mento, ska, reggae — with regulation modern jazz.

For her part, Ms. Marie was by turns dreamy, sensual, romantic, rhythmic, and funny — to miss the humor in these songs would be to miss the point. Belafonte and the authentic calypso singer-songwriters he emulated were primarily storytellers in rhythm.  

“Day-O (Banana Boat)” tells of hard labor — there may be a protest implied, but it’s essentially a celebration; “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” and “Mama Look a Boo-Boo” are fundamentally domestic comedies, poking fun at gender and generational norms. “Jamaica Farewell” is as haunting a love song as has ever been composed, and not just in the “Beetlejuice” sense of the word.

Ms. Marie is an outstanding entertainer, and, at the same time, she has always had a social conscience. We have long known her to perform songs, both her own and standards, that promote the values of equality and diversity. Yet she’s also not above crowd-pleasing shtick, like inviting audience participation on “Man Smart, Woman Smarter.”  

Ms. Marie and Mr. Charles also included some of Belafonte’s non-Caribbean material, namely the African American folk song “John Henry” — another tale of manual labor — and a traditional Irish song, “Londonderry Air (Danny Boy),” which Mr. Charles, surprisingly, said was his favorite.

The program concluded with the show’s title song, “Jump in the Line,” That song had a long history even before Belafonte, having been composed by Arima-born Lord Kitchener and notably recorded in a big band version by Woody Herman in 1952 for his album “Woody Herman Goes Native” and then by the short-lived Calypso avatar Lord Flea as “Shake, Senora.”

The singer, the bandleader, and all the musicians had their chance to shine, and “Jump in the Line” truly rocked and jumped.