Portland, you may have noticed, doesn't have much of a soul music scene. Yes, the fans of rhythm-based music have always been a little underfed in this town, but it would be mistaken to suggest that the city lacks soul altogether. Portland does have soul, just not enough soul music. The Soul'd Out Music Festival was conceived to correct this problem, and has done so valiantly. Last year, they caught us by surprise, only raising slivers of interest from the fact that so many outstanding acts had suddenly descended on Portland. This year, Soul’d Out not only came out in full force, but they upped their line-up game, as well. Lauryn Hill, Mos Def, Das Racist, Rusko, the Hot 8 Brass Band, Ellis Marsalis: we've covered them all in the last week or so, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. This festival was deep in terms of the caliber of artists it brought in and sharp in the variety of styles they managed to encompass. Rap, jazz, blues, soul, R&B: they hit on everything Portland has been deprived of.
Over the past two weeks, the festival offered up a heavy dosage of soul, a much-needed remedy for what’s been missing. The festival’s greatest achievement, in fact, has been to introduce to an often underexposed audience, the vibrant and consistently evolving nature of a musical movement that has largely operated outside of this city. Because, though Soul’d Out is based in Portland, and is for Portland (and don't get us wrong, we’ll gladly claim it), it is not entirely of Portland. Like the music itself, Soul’d Out has its spiritual heritage and ancestral home in New Orleans. An early home to both jazz and blues, and later to a rhythm & blues scene that was a direct precursor to rock & roll, New Orleans has exerted an overwhelmingly disproportionate influence over what constitutes popular music today. As such, the city’s musical and cultural flavor percolates through all varieties of soul music. And, at this year’s festival, New Orleans was doubly represented, producing no fewer than a half-dozen Soul’d Out performers.
The beauty, however, of what we are calling “soul music” – and make no mistake, it is an umbrella classification, a term that serves to describe how the music makes you feel more than what it sounds like – is the tremendous variability and adaptability the music possesses, without ever losing that essence that makes it what it is. And in that fact is another fine accomplishment of the festival, the bringing together of so many disparate branches of what is, nevertheless, still soul music. Black Joe Lewis brought their brand of garage soul to the Portland table and converted non-believers, moving even the skeptical to boogie throughout the show and leave with grins on their faces. Likewise, Mos Def’s performance cobbled together a diverse and enthusiastic crowd, and it was fascinating to speculate which part of Def’s dense musicianship had brought each of them to the show. Moments like these testified to the fact that soul is not only relevant, but essential, to a place like Portland.
Amidst all the great acts the festival brought us, the big unanticipated hit was the Hot 8 Brass Band, who killed it as the inaugural Artist in Residence. Hot 8 scores bonus points for having performed their wonderful music in a number of sets all over town. But more importantly, the Hot 8 laid down a soundtrack of authentic New Orleans rhythm & blues that doesn’t make its way to Portland as often as it ought to. Indeed, the fact that the festival was effectively bookended by prominent New Orleans-based jazz and R&B acts--with Preservation Hall Jazz Band kicking things off, and Ellis Marsalis and the Hot 8 Brass Band on the closing end--is more than appropriate. It stands as a statement of purpose, an acknowledgment of an artistic debt, and, most importantly, a wonderful opportunity. To the extent that Portland’s music scene can tend toward homogeneity, these acts have stirred a little something extra into the pot; to the extent that we are at risk of becoming complacent, a festival like Soul’d Out shakes things up. We are a city of music lovers, and rightly proud of that fact, but sometimes, as the song says, you need a little bit o’ soul to put you right.