What I'll see at the 53rd Annual Monterey Jazz Festival and why: Saturday

Fred Hersch

SATURDAY

The festival's first full day. We'll head over in the early afternoon all bright and bouncy and drag our tired selves back to the hotel after midnight. (It's a half-mile walk between our hotel and the festival site, a WPA-era fairgrounds, and it feels a lot longer at the end of the day.)

2 pm DownBeat Blindfold Test with Fred Hersch Hosted by Dan Ouellette (Dizzy's Den)
The premise is, jazz journalist Ouellette will attempt to stump pianist Hersch by playing several jazz recordings and asking him to identify the performers. It's really an excuse for what is sure to be a far-ranging, fascinating conversation about jazz. If you can't be there in person, you can read about it in a future issue of DownBeat.

If time allows, I'll attempt to catch the last part of...

2:20 pm Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue (Jimmy Lyons Stage—Arena)
This may end up being one of the most popular and talked-about acts at this year's festival. Trombone Shorty (so named because he started playing the instrument at age 4, when it was longer than he was tall) is (as someone in the know said the other day) the right person from the right place playing the right music at the right time. Translation: He's a tall, good looking, preternaturally talented man in his 20s from New Orleans playing jazz, hip-hop, soul, and street at a time when the doomsayers are wailing "Jazz is dead!" I won't be surprised if he second-lines the whole Arena crowd out the door and through the fairgrounds. We saw him this summer at the Minnesota Zoo (on a very nice outdoor stage, in case you non-Minnesotans are wondering) and loved him. Go Shorty!

3:30 pm Hristo Vitchev Quartet (Coffee House)
A jazz guitarist and composer from Bulgaria? I'll bite. With pianist Weber Iago, drummer Joe De Rose, and bassist Dan Robbins. (Tip: To do the festival well, try new things.)

4:00 pm Conversation with George Wein Hosted by Andrew Gilbert (Dizzy's Den)
Founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, producer of hundreds of music events annually since then, George Wein thought he was bowing out of the festival biz when he sold his company to the Festival Network, a newly-formed entity run by thirtysomething Chris Shields. By 2009, both the Newport and New York festivals (among others) were in shambles and Wein came to the rescue. The man is 84; won't he ever get to take it easy? He's a living jazz encyclopedia and hearing him speak should be interesting to say the least.

7:30 pm Gretchen Parlato Band (Night Club)
Everybody's talking about this young singer, including Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Of Parlato, Shorter has said, "in an inconspicuous way, Gretchen plays the same instrument as Frank Sinatra," and to be honest, I have no clue what that means. Her band is stellar: Lionel Loueke on guitar, Aaron Parks on piano and Fender Rhodes, Derrick Hodge on bass, Kendrick Scott on drums.

8 pm Billy Childs Quartet and the Kronos Quartet premiering Music for Two Quartets (Jimmy Lyons Stage—Arena)
It's the hour of the festival's first major music pileup: Childs and Kronos in the Arena, gifted young ukelelist Jake Shimabukuro on the Garden Stage, Septeto Nacional de Cuba at Dizzy's, and the Gerald Clayton Trio in the Coffee House. I'm torn between Childs/Kronos and Clayton but will probably opt for the former because the music they're premiering was commissioned by the MJF. Commissioning new works is a very good thing and I want to show my support. Also, I've enjoyed the commissions I've seen in the past: from Jason Moran, Dave Brubeck, Maria Schneider. (Kronos will also perform a new work by Schneider.) Pianist/composer/arranger Childs' quartet is impeccable: Brian Blade on drums, Scott Colley on bass, Steve Wilson on saxes and flute.

9:45 pm Chris Potter Underground (Garden Stage)
I would walk across hot coals to see this group: Potter on saxophones, Adam Rogers on guitar, Craig Taborn on Fender Rhodes, Nate Smith on drums. (Note no bass.) The band has been together for five years now, and although each member is involved with other bands and projects (Potter perhaps most famously with Dave Holland), they're committed. I'm super excited about seeing Craig Taborn again. Craig, your mom says hi.

10:50 pm Chick Corea Freedom Band with Kenny Garrett, Christian McBride, and Roy Haynes (Jimmy Lyons Stage—Arena)
The festival's all-star supergroup. This is the only time they will play together; McBride and Haynes will perform in other venues on the grounds on Sunday, but unless I'm mistaken, neither Corea nor Garrett will make another appearance. I was surprised to learn that the great drummer Roy Haynes is making his MJF debut this year.


I might have to leave early to catch at least part of Gerald Clayton's 11 pm set at the Coffee House. With Clayton on piano, Justin Brown on drums, and Joe Sanders on bass, it will be a fine way to end the night.

Anticipating Monterey

What's not to love about the Monterey Jazz Festival? Go more than once and the experience becomes cumulative. Not only do you have last year's memories to savor, you also have next year's lineup to look forward to. And when it's announced, it never disappoints.

Three cheers for MJF/53, to be held September 17-19 on the sweet fairgrounds of Monterey-by-the-sea. Hurray for the sheer, mind-boggling quantity: 500 artists on 7 stages for 85 performances squeezed into three nights and two days. No one sees them all, except maybe Forrest Dylan Bryant. Bravo for the quality, including 9 artists/groups making their Monterey festival debuts.

Is it really possible that the great Ahmad Jamal is playing this festival for the first time? (That Trombone Shorty is new this year I can understand--he's still a kid.) Has Harry Connick truly never made his way to Monterey? All I ask is that he not make this part of his Your Songs tour. Please, Harry, I'm begging you, don't sing "Close to You." Give us some of that New Orleans sugar, swagger and stride. Make us swoon.

Who else? Dianne Reeves is this year's artist in residence. Works for me, because I want to know her much better than I do. Roy Haynes, the dapper dresser and ageless wonder, will be there with his Fountain of Youth Band. (Jaleel Shaw, I hope that includes you.) Angelique Kidjo will perform with a band that includes Christian McBride, Lionel Loueke, and Kendrick Scott. Whew. Roy Hargrove will bring his big band. Nellie McKay will channel Doris Day--or not, depending on her mood. Whatever she does, she'll delight and confound the crowd. She's a one-woman variety/cabaret show.

More? The Freedom Band with Chick Corea, Kenny Garrett, McBride and Haynes. Rudresh Mahanthappa's Indo-Pak Coalition. The inestimable Marcus Roberts and his trio. Jake Shimabukuro, ukelelist extraordinaire. The Chris Potter Underground (with the splendid Craig Taborn, the pianist/keyboardist named most often when I ask jazz musicians, "Who are you listening to?").

Kronos Quartet. Gerald Clayton. Russell Malone. Gretchen Parlato. Les Nubians. Billy Childs. Fred Hersch--in performance and in Downbeat's always enjoyable "Blindfold Test." Can Dan Ouellette stump Hersch? We'll see about that. Sachal Vasandani. Dr. Lonnie Smith. Les McCann. Conversations with Haynes, impresario George Wein, and Sam Stephenson from The Jazz Loft Project. The whole four-part film series Icons Among Us.

And that's not even everyone and everything, and we haven't talked about the food. Or the unique and palpable charm of the place and the people. Moonlight in the open-air arena, and planes flying low overhead. The Flyswatter Lady. Paul Aschenbrenner in his moose hat. Tim Orr on his bike. Clint Eastwood strolling by. The smell of the ocean, the mist in the air.

There are still many jazz festivals out there, thank goodness. Someone I know attends the North Sea festival each year. Wish I could go. The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival is high on my list. I've been to Montreal and would love to return (though it's pricey; almost everything worth seeing is ticketed). I'd like to see Newport. Dear Jesus, please send me to Perugia someday. But until I win the lottery and can spend my life traveling with HH from festival to festival, he with his camera and I with my pen, make mine Monterey.

MJF/52

I'm reporting on the Monterey Jazz Festival for jazz.com, tweeting at twitter.com/bebopified (I'm mainly doing this for Howard Mandel's #jazzlives effort), and writing a festival wrap-up for jazzpolice.com when I return. (The wrap-up will feature John's pictures.) Day One at Monterey is here if not on the jazz.com home page.

And just when I think I'm working too hard, I find the Jazz Observer, a site written by jazz journalist and broadcaster Forrest Dylan Bryant, who's actually blogging from the festival and turning in great stories on the spot. I keep looking around for a guy with a laptop.

Photo: Kurt Elling on the lawn at Monterey.

Press credentials rock

Ten reasons I’m glad to be at the Monterey Jazz Festival

Numbers don’t imply preference or order of importance, they’re just a reminder to stop at 10.

1. Vijay Iyer. Say “VID-jay EYE-ur.” When Ben Ratliff writes “Presto! Here is the new great piano trio,” people notice. I haven’t seen Iyer since he was at the Walker Art Center with Rudresh Mahanthappa in 1996. Monterey may be wishing they had booked him into a larger space than the Coffee House Gallery. With Stephen Crump on bass, Marcus Gilmore on drums. Hoping we’ll hear several cuts from the forthcoming Historicity. Sunday, September 20, 8 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.

2. Buffalo Collision. I’m not joking when I say that if you’re a jazz fan in Minneapolis/St. Paul and you leave town for even a few days, you will miss something you wish you had seen. As I looked ahead to Monterey, I rued missing Buffalo Collision at the Dakota this Friday and Saturday. Somehow they will play the late set there on Saturday (which ends around 1:30 a.m.) and end up in Monterey in time to play the Garden Stage at 5:30 on Sunday afternoon. Ethan Iverson on piano, Dave King on drums, Tim Berne on saxophone, Hank Roberts on cello.

3. The Monterey Jazz Festival All-Stars Featuring Kenny Barron, Regina Carter, Kurt Elling, and Russell Malone. Supergroup! All four of these artists have pleased me immensely in the past—the elegant pianist Barron and adventurous violinist Carter together in Montreal, Malone in various configurations (and in conversation; the angel-faced guitar player tells wicked jokes); vocalist Kurt Elling so many times I should have Platinum Elite status. Jonathan Blake on drums, Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass. Friday, 9:40 p.m., Arena/Jimmy Lyons Stage; Saturday, 8:00 p.m., Dizzy’s Den.

4. Pete Seeger. Not a jazz artist but let’s all get over it. Like many jazz festivals and clubs, Monterey has broadened its scope (it has long featured blues on Saturday afternoons) and if that helps to keep the gates/doors open I’m all for it. Seeger is an icon. Earlier this week my husband and I met someone who had volunteered at the Haight-Ashbury free clinic in the 60s. He talked about the songs, the protests, the artists, the mood, and the excitement of the times as if they all happened yesterday, with special reference to and affection for Seeger. I’m not a folk fan but I’d be a fool to miss this. I’m expecting at least a mention and perhaps a tribute to Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, who died on Wednesday.

5. Jason Moran & The Bandwagon Premiering Feedback. Someone (and I can’t remember who—tell me and I’ll correct this immediately) recently wrote about how rock music is finding new life in video games and why can’t jazz do the same? So, why not a video game with Vijay Iyer and Jason Moran as riff-to-the-death piano players? Maybe throw in Robert Glasper and Eldar (whom I missed seeing in Minneapolis earlier this week). Back on topic, I most recently saw Moran at the Dakota with Charles Lloyd, Reuben Rogers, and Eric Harland. For many in the audience, Moran stole the show. Can’t wait to hear his new commission. Thank you, Monterey, for commissioning new work by important artists. 7:00 p.m. Sunday, Arena/Jimmy Lyons Stage. Moran and the Bandwagon also play at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday in the Night Club.

6. Dave Brubeck Quartet Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Time Out. Has it really been half a century since Brubeck recorded a tune in 5/4 time that is not only instantly recognizable today but still catchy, infectious, and fun? Brubeck has been part of the Monterey festival since the start. Earlier this year, health problems interrupted his touring schedule. People will rise to their feet en masse when he comes on stage on Sunday night at 8:20 p.m. (or thereabouts) in the Arena. It’s going to be a thrilling, memorable moment. I was here for Brubeck's “Cannery Row Suite” premiere in 2006 (with vocalists Kurt Elling and Roberta Gambarini) and it was unforgettable. With Randy Jones on drums, Bobby Militello on alto sax and flute, Michael Moore on bass. Go Dave!

7. Alfredo Rodriguez Trio. Quincy Jones tried and failed to get this young Cuban pianist a visa. In January 2009--earlier this year, not a typo--he defected to the US. A friend saw him at the Detroit Jazz Festival and raved about him. That’s all I know, but it’s enough to put me in the bleachers at the Garden Stage on Sunday at 4:00 p.m.

8. Dee Dee Bridgewater. The lovely, endlessly creative and surprising Dee Dee! Does she still shave her head? Is she still singing Malian music? She’s coming to Minneapolis next year to sing with the Minnesota Orchestra. Does she have another new project for Monterey or will she draw from her extensive and colorful repertoire of French songs, Kurt Weill tunes, straight-ahead, Ella, Ellington, etc.? Not a clue. Saturday night, 9:20 p.m., Arena/Jimmy Lyons Stage; Saturday night, 11:30 p.m., Dizzy’s Den.

9. Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Quartet. I’ve seen flutist/saxophonist Tabackin at the Artist’s Quarter in St. Paul but never with his wife, pianist/bandleader/composer/arranger/NEA jazz master Akiyoshi. Must stop by the Night Club on Sunday evening at 7:00 p.m. Ack! Same time as Jason Moran's premiere in the Arena! Sometime around 6:30 I'll start gnashing my teeth and wailing.

10. The food, the ambience, the characters. (a) Monterey has good fair food—multi-ethnic, tasty, substantial, prepared in grills and ovens that send clouds of fragrant smoke into the air. This year there’s a salad bar. Heirloom tomatoes? (b) The ambience is laid-back, California-style party. No passing bodies over mosh pits, no fisticuffs or flying F-bombs. It’s genial and courteous, which is not to say it’s fuddy-duddy or boring, just that this is one place where civility apparently still exists and the excitement happens on stage. (c) Hoping the Hat Man (lobster hat, jailbird hat) is still at the Arena gates and Dee Dee Rainbow is feeling well enough to attend this year. She was absent last year and it was a Very Big Deal.

I’m at 10 (and I even fudged 10 a bit) so must quit, but not without mentioning Joe Lovano and Conrad Herwig, Randy Brecker, John Scofield, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the mind-blowing trio of Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, and Lenny White (awesome last week at the Dakota in Minneapolis), Esperanza Spalding, the John Patitucci Trio with Lovano and Brian Blade, and DJ Logic, all of whom will be here in the balmy ocean breezes and cool evening mists of Monterey at a jazz festival that has continued without interruption for 52 consecutive years. Times are tough so the festival has taken the unusual step of offering single-show arena tickets for sale; usually you have to buy a package to get a reserved seat in the Arena, where the biggest names perform. Please, people, come.

This year I'll be reporting on the festival for jazz.com and writing a wrap-up for jazzpolice.com when I return home. So you can check those sites over the weekend and into next week if you want to know more.

Travel ramblings, if anyone cares

HH and I are in Monterey for the 52nd annual Monterey Jazz Festival, which doesn’t start until Friday. Until then it’s vay-cay-shun. Which begins with our annual stop at the Swanton Berry Farm on Highway 1 for strawberry shortcake. Organic strawberries and real whipped cream on a sweet biscuit.

Changes to Swanton’s this year include more furniture inside, more jams (which you can sample by spooning them onto animal crackers), and a young plaid-shirted employee who claims to be the biggest Vikings fan born in L.A. He asked if we had seen the day’s game. We had not. We were on a plane, squashed like sorry sardines among the other pleated, folded, pressed and compressed passengers on the full flight.

At the hotel we talked first to the check-in person and second to the concierge. A concierge is someone you want to know and treat with utmost respect. The one at the Hyatt Monterey has been here for 20 years. So you can say to her such vague, nonspecific, beetle-brained things as “I picked up a card at a small Italian restaurant in Pacific Grove last year but left it on my desk at home” and she’ll say “Oh, you mean Joe Rombi’s, would you like me to make a reservation for you?” Crab cake followed by the Sunday spaghetti-and-meatballs special, with meatballs the size of cannonballs, and a nice chianti.

On Monday we drove to Moss Landing, which (according to the Insiders’ Guide to the Monterey Peninsula, an extremely detailed and useful book) is supposed to have a lot of antique stores. Maybe it used to but it doesn’t anymore. The recession seems to have kneecapped this little town on the shore of Monterey Bay. We were the only people in the shops we visited and the café where we stopped for liquid refreshment.

Moss Landing is, as of 2008, the new home of the Shakespeare Society of America, where we spent an hour or so talking with CEO Terry Taylor and where HH got his picture taken in two Your-Head-Here life-size cut-outs, one a knight and one a king. (See above for the king; the knight's on fb.) Taylor’s background includes a passion for the Bard, a degree from Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, and a career in consulting and cell phone sales. The Shakespeare Society building is full of prints, paintings, costumes, busts, scripts, books, and models of the Globe Theater. It is a charming, strange, and fascinating find in this town of 300 people.

Taylor pointed us up Hwy 1 to a dock that was installed for visitors in 2008 but was almost immediately taken over by sea lions. Posted signs warn against trying to rescue any and explain that overpopulation has led to disease and starvation. I’m not an expert at estimating the size of crowds but am guessing the dock held more than 1,000 sea lions. They were packed tighter than we were on our flight from Minneapolis. When the wind shifted, they smelled very bad. Make that very, very, very, very bad.

Back in Monterey, we walked the Monterey Recreational Trail from Fisherman’s Wharf along the ocean to the Seven Gables Inn in Pacific Grove and back again. Then dinner at the Monterey Fish House, another tip from Her Holiness the Concierge. Oysters on the half shell, crab ravioli, grilled artichoke, calamari Sicilian (in red sauce with calamata olives). Noisy, crazy, packed, delicious.

We sat at the bar. The man seated to our right was a physician who had worked at the free clinic in Haight-Ashbury during the 1960s, when patients included people like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. He urged us to spend at least one day in Big Sur, something we plan to do anyway, and offered specific suggestions: Buy chocolate-chip cookies from the Big Sur Bakery. Sit on the deck at the Ventana Inn. And walk barefoot along Pfeiffer Beach where, he promised, the surf sounds like jazz.

More photos--sea lions, houses in Pacific Grove, whatever--may come later once HH downloads his camera card.

How Cool is the Monterey Jazz Festival

Bret Primack, the Jazz Video Guy, captures the coolness of the festival we love in this video.



Watch for Tim Orr, the cool and handsome marketing/media relations dude who bestows upon us our press creds each year. Yay Tim!

We met Bret at last year's festival--nice guy, very friendly, carries a lot of equipment. I briefly thought, "Hey, I could make jazz podcasts, how hard could it be?" until I learned more about him. Uh, no, Pamela, you could not.

MJF/51: Festival Wrap-Up

The whole glorious Monterey Jazz Festival weekend--as much of it as I could squeeze in--is described in my just-posted wrap-up on Jazz Police, with you-are-there photos by John Whiting.

If the flow seems a little hinky, simply resize your browser window. (Click and pull on the right-hand corner if you're on a Mac--I'm guessing it works that way on PCs, too?)

XOXOXO to Lena-Andrea Kobett for wrangling the beast.

MJF/51: Sunday

The final day of this fine festival always comes too soon. We saw what we could: Jamie Cullum, a conversation with Cullum and Clint Eastwood, a bit of Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, Kurt Elling, Herbie Hancock. As we left the arena (during Herbie Hancock's encore), Kurt and Laurence Hobgood were leaving the autographing table. I wanted to run after them but exercised self-restraint.

In the days to come, I'll post longer pieces on Cassandra Wilson, Jamie Cullum, Kurt Elling, and Antonio Sanchez. A festival review/wrap-up will appear on Jazz Police.

(Update: The wrap-up has been posted.)

Photo by John Whiting.

MJF/51: Saturday

We began day 2 of the Monterey Jazz Festival at Maria Schneider's rehearsal for the world premiere performance of her commissioned work, "Willow Lake." We heard a complete run-through of this beautiful piece, which reminded me of birds and cattails and sun sparkling on blue water.

When we go to live music, we usually see the performance part, the go-for-broke, in-the-moment event. We rarely see the behind-the-scenes crafting and shaping and working-out part, the take-it-again-from-bar-317 part.



Tonight's set list for the Jimmy Lyons Arena:

Last Season
Choro Dancado
Willow Lake
Rich's Piece
Hang Gliding

We were told the order could change. It didn't. That was the concert we heard later that night, and at the end, the crowd gave Maria and her orchestra a standing ovation.



Also seen/heard on day 2: DownBeat Magazine's Blindfold Test with Cassandra Wilson, Maceo Parker and the Monterey Jazz Festival Next Generation Orchestra, the Terence Blanchard Quintet (very briefly, but with a big surprise), Antonio Sanchez & Migration (David Sanchez, Miguel Zenon, Scott Colley), the Matt Wilson-Bill Frisell Duo, and, to end and neatly frame the day, the last few minutes of the Maria Schneider Orchestra's late-night performance at Dizzy's Den, where Kurt Elling and Laurence Hobgood were standing outside the door, deep in conversation with two other people. I wanted to interrupt but exercised self-restraint.

Photos by John Whiting

MJF/51: Friday

I'll write a Monterey Jazz Festival wrap-up for Jazz Police when I return home on Monday. A preview: On Friday we saw the Joshua Redman Trio, Cassandra Wilson, Matt Wilson's Arts & Crafts, the Christian McBride Band, Anat Cohen, and Maraca "Cuban Lullabies," a Latin band led by cuban flautist Orlando "Maraca" Valle and featuring David Sanchez, Miguel Zenon, Giovanni Hidalgo, and Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez, among others--a dream team.

Photo of the Joshua Redman Trio by John Whiting. L to R: Matt Penman, Joshua Redman, Brian Blade.

MJF/51: Next Generation Jazz Orchestra

When: Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008 • Where: Monterey Jazz Festival, Garden Stage • Who: MJF Next Generation Jazz Orchestra

The Monterey Jazz Festival Next Generation Jazz Orchestra features 21 young musicians selected from 18 high schools in 11 states through a rigorous audition process. Previous members of this ensemble (formerly known as the MJF High School All-Star Big Band) include pianists Benny Green and Patrice Rushen, bassist Larry Grenadier, and saxophonists Joshua Redman and Dave Koz.



Led by Mr. Paul Contos, the NGJO played for an invitation-only crowd at the Thursday Night Pre-Festival BBQ. During the festival, they will perform with Maceo Parker and with Artist-in-Residence Christian McBride. Earlier this year, they played the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam.



We heard them as we walked toward the fairgrounds, jazz pouring into the night. Although (as Contos later told the crowd) they had been rehearsing for hours and had played another gig earlier today, they sounded great together and the solos were fine. I especially enjoyed the final tune, an arrangement of "Skylark" by Bob Brookmeyer that made me hear that old familiar melody as if it were brand new. Nice solo from alto saxophonist Hailey Niswanger, one of two young women in the band.

MJF/51: Concert for Kids

When: Thursday, Sept. 18 • Where: Monterey Jazz Festival, Garden Stage • Who: Berklee Latin Jazz All-Stars: Niv Toar, trumpet and flugelhorn; Enrique “Kalani” Trinidad, flute; Abraham Olivo, piano; Juan Maldonado, bass; Marcos Lopez, timbales; Paulo Stagnaro, congas

If you want kids to listen to jazz, take them out of school, give them lunch, and make it Latin jazz played by musicians near their age.



The 51st Monterey Jazz Festival unofficially (or officially?) began with a free concert on Thursday for the children of the Monterey County Public Schools. The festival spends close to $1 million each year on jazz education, and the annual Concert for Kids, a 13-year-old tradition, is part of its educational outreach program.



The Berklee kids are serious: top scholarship students at the Berklee College of Music in Boston (not the UCLA Berkeley, as we were reminded more than once). DownBeat named them the 2008 Best College Jazz Band (under the name La Timbistica); they have performed or recorded with Paquito D’Rivera, Dave Valentin, Cachao, Danilo Perez, and Victor Manuelle. This was their first MJF/51 set but won’t be their last; they are also scheduled to play on Friday night and Saturday afternoon.



They gave us a program of standards and originals, not a dud among them. Foot-tapping, head-bobbing music with that irresistible Latin beat. Some of the kids listened closely. Others texted or played with their cell phones or iPods. Several formed conga lines and danced around the picnic tables. The sun shone brightly, and the set started at noon and lasted 45 minutes, just long enough that no one got too restless.

Monterey Jazz Festival Preview

Counting down the days to Friday night and the start of the Monterey Jazz Festival. Which is not the same as saying I want Friday to come quickly. Vacation is good.

Read the festival preview on Jazz Police.


Photos: The Garden Stage at last year's festival. The Jazz Police bumper sticker in the back window of this year's rental car. (HH packed it, clever man.)

Free iTunes!

Cool Monterey Jazz Festival card-on-a-lanyard worth 17 free downloads on iTunes. (It says 15, but you get 17.) The songs are all by artists related to the festival (either they performed this year or during previous years): Oscar Peterson, Geoff Keezer, Sonny Rollins, Terence Blanchard, Mulgrew Miller, Christian Scott, James Moody. Every time we turned around, someone was asking "Free iTunes card?" and we always said "Sure!" We ended up with 12 and gave them away.

Sightings

When a big jazz festival comes to town, it pays to keep your eyes open. And it helps if you're staying at the Hyatt, which seems to be Jazz Central.

So far, we've seen the following people walking around, meeting friends at the bar, waiting for shuttles, or dining at the restaurant: Dave Holland, Chris Potter, Benny Greene and Belinda Underwood, Geoff Keezer, Sean Jones, Gerald Wilson, Anthony Wilson, Craig Taborn (to whom we delivered a hug from his mom), Gonzalo Rubalcaba...and Dave Brubeck, leaning politely toward the piano in the hotel lounge while someone well-intentioned but utterly clueless played a few bars of "Take Five."

John wants to add a few car sightings from our stay: Ferrari, Maserati, and the Bentley Continental GT in Beluga Black, with windows tinted so dark it could have been filled with clowns and we wouldn't have been able to tell.

We're authorized!

Why We're Here

The Monterey Jazz Festival begins tomorrow. There are two levels of tickets: arena packages (which get you into everything including the big shows in the 7,000-seat equestrian arena) and grounds packages (everything but the arena). Arena packages have been sold out for weeks. Saturday and Sunday grounds tickets are also sold out.

The lineup includes John McLaughlin, Dave Holland, Diana Krall, Los Lobos, Terence Blanchard, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Gerald Wilson, Joey De Francesco, Otis Taylor, Cyrus Chestnut, Craig Taborn, Sean Jones, and on and on. Clint Eastwood and John Sayles are scheduled to talk about jazz in the movies.

We can pick up our press credentials starting at 10 a.m. After that, if time allows, we're off to Point Lobos. We spent today exploring Monterey proper and adjacent Pacific Grove: antiquarian bookstores, art galleries, shops. The people we met in Pacific Grove were friendly, warm, and chatty. The guidebooks say it's a place with a small-town feel, and it is, except even small houses are valued at $1 million.

Dinner tonight at Fresh Cream. We'll be eating fair food for the next few days.

September means Monterey and jazz

Two years ago this September, I attended the Monterey Jazz Festival for the first time. John and I returned last year with press credentials and reported on the festival for the Jazz Police Web site. We're going again this year for the festival's 50th anniversary. Join us as we spend a few days in California, then work the festival starting on Friday the 21st. We'll be filing articles and photos with the Jazz Police; I'll link to them here. We'll also post pictures of Carmel, Monterey, Big Sur, and Hearst Castle.

Today's Big Question: Will we really get the Mustang convertible that Budget Rent-A-Car has sort of promised us, or will we be stuck with a PT Cruiser?

MJF/49: From Brubeck to B3 at the 2006 Monterey Jazz Festival

It’s still light when we enter the Arena on the final night of the Monterey Jazz Festival. Actor Clint Eastwood introduces the first of two giant headliners: Dave Brubeck. Eastwood is a jazz buff, passionate Festival supporter, and lifelong Brubeck fan; in 2002, he told CNN, “I have been following Dave Brubeck since the Burma Lounge on Lakeshore Avenue in the mid '40s, but I was here in 1958, which was the first year of the festival. And Dave was there then. So I have been kind of a groupie for a lot of years.”

At 85 years old, Brubeck has a touring schedule that would make most of us tired just reading about it. In the past three months, he’s played 22 dates including Carnegie Hall, the Toronto Jazz Festival, the Montreal Jazz Festival, Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, the Newport Jazz Festival, and Tanglewood. He’s here in Monterey to premiere a new work commissioned by the Festival, a tribute to American author John Steinbeck called “Cannery Row Suite.”

But first, Brubeck and the other members of his quartet—Bobby Militello on alto sax and flute, Michael Moore on bass, Randy Jones on drums—warm up with an appropriately bright and cheerful “Sunny Side of the Street.” Brubeck opens “Stormy Weather” with a tender solo; in comes Militello with the melody and we’re off. The big screen flashes close-ups of Brubeck’s hands, sculpted by the gods and blessed by the muses. A wistful “Over the Rainbow” is the perfect song for the Festival’s last night.

Brubeck rises and goes to the mike to set up the next song. “It’s Sunday, and we’d like to play a piece sacred to this day. It started as a Jewish chant, then Roman soldiers came into Jerusalem and decided it would make a great march.” He pauses. “Are there any old Catholics in the house?” We laugh. He continues, “People say to me, ‘Why don’t you play some old tunes?’ This one is 2,000 years old.” The quartet performs “Tantum Ergo.” It’s part of a larger work called the Pane Lingua Variations. You can hear it in its entirety on Telarc’s Classical Brubeck.

Back at the mike, Brubeck tells the crowd, “When [Monterey Jazz Festival general manager] Tim Jackson asked me to write an opera for tonight, I said no, no way. ‘Only an hour? Please?’ No. ‘What if you only develop three or four characters and make it a half-hour?’ I said, ‘I’ll think that over. It sounds more like something that would work at a jazz festival.’” More laughter.

Working closely with his wife and collaborator, Iola, who wrote the libretto, Brubeck penned a tribute to John Steinbeck and Cannery Row, the novel Steinbeck set in Monterey during the Depression. It’s a tale of hard times and colorful characters. The ones Brubeck chose to portray are Doc, a marine biologist; Dora, a madam; and Mack, one of “the boys” who inhabit the Palace Flophouse and Grill.

“I wrote difficult arias,” Brubeck explains, “almost impossible to sing. Tim [Jackson] said ‘Let’s do it, I’ve got the best people hired; we’ll throw it all together when we get here.” Brubeck was motivated by the fact that he trusts the Festival audience. “I’ve done many things here without much rehearsal,” he says. “Please understand that yesterday was the first day we could all get together.”

Jackson wasn’t lying when he promised Brubeck the “best people.” In the world premiere performance that unfolds on stage, Doc is played by Kurt Elling, Dora by Roberta Gambarini, and Mack by one of the Brubecks’ musical sons, Chris. The narration is by Steinbeck’s son Thom; black-and-white slides of historic Monterey on the stage’s big screen set the mood. The music is catchy, hummable, and complex.

Dora’s aria is a killer. Let’s remember that Gambarini left her hometown of Torino, Italy, just eight years ago with dreams of being a jazz singer. I first heard her at the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis in May 2004, where she sang with Roy Hargrove. I liked her a lot but noticed that her Italian accent was pronounced. She returned to the Dakota in March 2006 as a special guest with Mark O’Connor’s Hot Swing Trio, and what a difference two years had made. Along the way, she shared stages with Hank Jones (with whom she also performed at Monterey), Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Michael Brecker, Christian McBride, and Toots Thielemans. Her recently released debut CD, Easy to Love, has won raves.

Tonight she assumes the role of Dora with no problem. Through high notes, low notes, intervals and scatting, she inhabits the character. And she does it without music or lyrics.

Elling met up with Brubeck in New York City in June, where he had a glimpse of the challenges in store for him as Doc. “Dave was very gracious,” Elling told jazz writer Andrew Gilbert. “He had it [Doc’s part] pitched way up there and he put it in another key for me, a key that’s humane for a baritone.” On stage at the Arena, he nails it, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has heard Elling perform live, spinning stories and scats out of the air.

As Mack, Chris Brubeck sings and plays the bass trombone in good company: Joel Brown on vocals and guitar, and Peter “Madcat” Ruth on vocals and harmonica, an instrument that features prominently in Brubeck’s piece. They’re accompanied by a chorus from the University of the Pacific. It all holds together so tightly that it’s hard to believe they have had one day to rehearse. On the other hand, these are jazz musicians, accustomed to doing things on the fly.

I can’t say I loved “Cannery Row Suite.” But I’m glad I was in the audience to see it, and I’m even more glad that organizations like the Monterey Jazz Festival are willing and able to commission major new works by jazz artists. (Side note: Three cheers for the Guggenheim Foundation, which gave Patricia Barber a fellowship to write songs based on characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Barber’s deliciously dark and dense creations can be heard on her brand-new CD, Mythologies.)

Brubeck and Co. receive a standing ovation. The red curtain closes and the Arena lights come on. People fill the aisles, hoping there’s time enough to score a latte from the Starbucks booth or maybe a barbecued pork sandwich before the second half of the evening begins. Before long, Clint Eastwood returns to bring Oscar Peterson to the stage.

I have never seen Oscar Peterson perform live. Shortly before coming to Monterey, he sold out a six-night engagement at Yoshi’s in Oakland that earned mixed reviews. Writing for InsideBayArea.com, Jim Harrington noted that Peterson’s playing was “tentative to start” and his hand speed “wasn’t really up to his standards.” In the Contra Costa Times, Andrew Gilbert was more forthright, calling Peterson’s performance “all too painfully human” and “a poignant reminder that time catches up to even the fleetest.”

I stay for the first song and a half. Maybe it gets better; I’ll never know. What I do know is that this is not how I want to remember Oscar Peterson.

Dr. Lonnie Smith by John Whiting

My 2006 Monterey experience ends at the Nightclub, a venue I’ve grown especially fond of because it’s enclosed, warm, and near the exit, all good things at the end of a long day and a crisp night. Mocha in hand, I find a seat as close as possible to Dr. Lonnie Smith, the Ph.D. of the Hammond B3. He’s joined onstage by Peter Bernstein on guitar and Allison Miller on drums. Both more than hold their own in the presence of the mad doctor.

I’m most intrigued by Miller, first because she’s a girl drummer (a rarity in jazz; Terri Lyne Carrington also comes to mind), and second because she’s a dervish on stage. I learn later that Downbeat named her a “Rising Star Drummer,” she’s based in New York, and she has also toured with Natalie Merchant (another dervish). Plus she already has a CD out called 5 a.m. Stroll featuring Ray Drummond, Steve Wilson, Virginia Mayhew, and Bruce Barth. Ms. Miller, please come to Minneapolis/St. Paul soon.

Dr. Lonnie is in the middle of some crazy thing. He’s playing and singing “Misty” in a voice like Johnny Mathis. I’m as helpless as a kitten trying to figure out why. Next, he holds a high note for a ridiculously long time (singing, not playing). Someone in the audience shouts, “It’s that yoga s***!” (Does Dr. Lonnie do yoga? He looks like he does.) Then he channels Stevie Wonder in “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.” After that, he segues into a blues tune and some odd asides (“Hanky panky you shore is stanky/Hunky punky shore is funky!”). It’s surreal and hilarious.

Eventually, the white-bearded, turban-wearing Doctor gets down to business and gives us some songs from his new CD on Palmetto, Jungle Soul. A virtuosic “Willow Weep for Me.” A bluesy, bleak “And the World Weeps” with a she-done-me-wrong solo. A funky, hypnotic “Witch Doctor.” We’re under the spell of this hot little band.

And suddenly it’s over. Allison Miller packs up her drums. Peter Bernstein locks up his guitar. Smith signs autographs, poses for pictures, and hugs people. It’s a feel-good ending to an otherwise poignant evening. A few vendors are still holding on, but most are getting ready to go home. Time for us to do the same.