Well, we managed five days of picture-perfect weather before Mother Nature finally made her presence felt last night. And did she ever. Still, heavy rain didn't necessarily put a damper on the attendance at some of the indoor shows, which underscores the local appetite for jazz.

By now an RIJF staple, the Dave Rivello Ensemble once again gave audiences a compelling glimpse into Eastman faculty member and bandleader/composer Rivello's steady progression as a composer, as well as some suggestions as to where big band music might go in the future. Widely thought of as a style that's frozen in the past, in Rivello's hands the large-ensemble format clearly still has more mileage left.

Rivello premiered two of his new works in the Big Tent last night, including "The Suspension of Disbelief," a piece he was recently commissioned to write for the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. With that piece, he demonstrated his ability to work with different shadings of mood as opposed to the more obvious, large-stroke melodrama typical of bands with similar instrumentation.

Watching a big band can sometimes feel like the musical equivalent of standing in front of a jet engine; while it's thrilling to get taken aback by an orchestra going at full bore, Rivello handles his group more like a high-performance vehicle. He seems to see the ensemble not just in terms of its size, and his writing takes advantage of its capacity for subtlety and dynamics. It doesn't take a connoisseur to recognize the singularity of Rivello's vision. And though he kept saying that it's a privilege to present his band at the festival year after year, the opposite also holds true in that we are privileged to have such steady access to his work.

A Danish children's lullaby about an elephant mother singing her young elephant child to sleep might seem like a strange inspiration for a progressive jazz outfit that skirts the bounds of the avant-garde, but NYNDK clearly has an expansive mentality. Founded around the nucleus of Danish pianist Soren Muller, Norwegian saxophonist Ole Mathisen, and American trombonist Chris Washburne (the group's equivalent of a frontman), NYNDK was nonetheless turbo-powered by its elastic, hard-charging rhythm section, bassist Boris Kozlov and drummer Tony Moreno. As it assertively wended its way through three pieces by Charles Ives, NYNDK proved that a band can aim left of center without necessarily going over anyone's head, and that abstract doesn't have to be synonymous with esoteric.

Washburne told a story about how Ives' father would instruct two marching bands to approach each other from opposite ends of a football field while each played in a different key and rhythm. At this show, NYNDK never did quite aim for that level of cacophonous tension, and focused instead on quirks in the interplay between the musicians. From the opening THWAP! of Neumann's first hit (on a tune called "Blade Runner" -- "not about the bad movie but about the good drummer"), it was clear that the rhythm section was, in some ways, driving the whole enterprise. NYNDK was distinct in how it actually played short pieces, and the band's sudden, OK-we've-made-our-point endings added character. 

I was astounded -- and encouraged -- to see a decent-sized cluster of folks sitting patiently in the rain a little after 9 p.m. waiting for the second set by the Central New York Jazz Orchestra to begin, with a line simultaneously forming for Baye Kouyate's second act at Kilbourn. By then the rain had subsided, but it was still cold and wet, so I was impressed. Instead of leaving the festival site in dampened spirits, I merely left damp, but uplifted by the sound of jazz still echoing in the streets.