San Jose in August

[Mike Schwartz]

www.sanjosejazz.org


FESTIVAL ARTISTS
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650 Connection
Aaron Lington Quintet
Angie Stone
Anthony Blea Y Su Charanga
Airmen of Note
Benny Velarde
Candela
Charlie Musslewhite
Charles McPherson
Chuchito Valdes
Claudia Gomez
David Friesen Trio
Denise Donatelli
David ‘Fathead’ Newman's "I Remember Ray" featuring Marcus Belgrave, John Menegan, Yoron Israel, John DiMartini, Cynthia Scott and Howard Johnson
Eddie Gale
Fito Reynoso Orquestra Ritmo y Armonia
Full Spectrum featuring Wayne Bergeron
Gerald Albright
Ileana Santamaria
Jackie Ryan
JC Smith hosts the Oakland Allstars featuring Craig Horton, Ella Pennewell , Ronnie Stewart and Teddy "Bluesmaster Watson"
John Calloway
John Jorgensen
John Santos Quintet
Judi Ferrari
Karabali
Lee Ritenour All-Stars featuring Dave Grusin, Alex Acuna, Patrice Rushen and Brian Bromberg
La Familia y Su Son
Latin Jazz All Stars in a Tribute to HIlton Ruiz with Ray Vega, Pete and Juan Escovedo, Jimmy Bosch and Yunior Cabrera
Leela James
Les Yeux Noirs
Mazacote
Mighty Mo Rodgers
Monica Marquis
Orchestra de Moderna Tradicion
Orchestra del Sol
Pellejo Seco
Rad
Ray Obiedo
RB Express
Realistic Orchestra
Red Holloway's 80th Birthday Celebration featuring Frank Morgan, Charles McPherson and Greg Osby
San Jose Jazz Youth Orchestra
directed by Dave Gregoric
Sasha Dobson
Shane Dwight
Sony Holland
Taylor P Collins
The Blues Guitar Extravaganza Featuring Rene Solis and Kenny Neal
Wayne Bergeron
Wayne de la Cruz
Wayne Wallace

[Mike Schwartz]

Nicely done! I'm in complete agreement. They were getting 160,000-170,000 people for the festival weekend without the likes of an Albright and a R&B stage. Are they afraid people wouldn't dig down for the 5 bucks if it were more of a jazz festival? Ridiculous.........


San Jose Jazz Festival: Where is the jazz?
SAN JOSE FESTIVAL STRAYS TOO FAR FROM ITS ROOTS
By Richard Scheinin
Mercury News
San Jose Mercury News
Article Launched:05/20/2007 01:39:46 AM PDT


We live in a time when what seems to be, often isn't. An all-beef hot dog is filled with water and sugar and assorted binding agents, and may even come in a pork casing.

Why are you reading this in the Sunday arts section? Because I'm wondering when a jazz festival by name is no longer a jazz festival in reality.

The question arises because San Jose Jazz has announced the headliners of this summer's 18th Annual Comcast San Jose Jazz Festival Presented by Southwest Airlines. The festival, spanning Aug. 8-12, with most acts performing over the last three days, has many ingredients, though the jazz part seems to be getting lost among the musical equivalents of water, sugar and those binding agents.

This time around, the festival's Main Stage, in the Plaza de Cesar Chavez in downtown San Jose, will feature rhythm and blues, smooth jazz and cranked-up fusion jazz out of L.A.'s commercial studio scene as well as a couple of good-looking all-star groups, one straight-ahead jazz, the other Latin jazz. It's a mixed bag, and I'm not sure what message San Jose Jazz is sending.

What's the big deal?

Well, a lot of people, including this writer, actually think jazz is the most significant musical form to emerge anywhere in the world in the past century. It is entertaining, mind-expanding and soul-enriching. It is expansive, an ocean of music, miles deep. And like any great music, it can offer you a great time while momentarily transporting you and maybe even changing your life.

It also is being pushed to the cultural margins in this era of global corporate media, when "American Idol" and "Dancing With the Stars" seem to have the whole world hypnotized. And yet, in recent years, San Jose Jazz has done something remarkable: It has presented a practically free festival (it now costs $5 for the whole weekend) attended by tens of thousands who have practically worshiped at the altar of jazz.

But last year, something tipped toward pop. Geoff Roach, the new executive director of San Jose Jazz, booked the Neville Brothers and Dr. John on the Main Stage. I'm a fan of both. Still, why were they centerpieces of what had been a successful jazz festival?

Roach, a New Orleans native, explained that he wanted to present a post-Katrina celebration of New Orleans music. He argued that jazz and New Orleans rhythm and blues are first cousins anyway, and that if the festival had in any way slipped away from its pure jazz mission (he didn't quite cop to the slippage), it was because of the happenstance of economics and artist availability.

I spoke to Roach this week and again he pledged allegiance to jazz roots while citing economics and artist availability as influencing the lineup. The festival (which kicks off Aug. 8 with a fundraising gala) has an operating budget of about $1 million; admissions, concessions and corporate sponsorships are major funding sources. I don't doubt that, with each year, those dollars are stretched thinner.

Still, choices are being made - which Roach admitted. The Main Stage is for "acts that are more widely accepted by the public," he said. "It's basically giving the audience what they want."

Did they previously not want jazz? In recent years, I've never noticed anything but large crowds pressing up to the Main Stage and expressing pure pleasure while listening to Jimmy Heath, James Moody, Terence Blanchard, Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, Steve Turre, Geri Allen and many others, including Dr. Lonnie Smith, who, to Roach's credit, appeared last year.

Now, let's look at the 2007 festival's Main Stage headliners for Saturday, Aug. 11, the first full day of music. Three of four have been announced. Leading off is the Airmen of Note, the big band of the U.S. Air Force. Hmmm. Let's reserve judgment, but Basie, or his second coming, this is not.

Second is saxophonist Gerald Albright, the smooth jazz star whose treacly murmurings bear as much relationship to actual jazz as John Williams soundtracks do to Mahler symphonies. Albright is jazz light, and maybe not jazz at all. (Guitarist Lee Ritenour, appearing Sunday with an "all-star" band out of L.A., represents another step toward glossed-up commercial jazz.)

Third is David "Fathead" Newman, a truly great jazz and rhythm and blues saxophonist, leading a tribute to his old boss, Ray Charles. Some people will hate me for saying this but, sorry, as much as I love the music of Brother Ray, all these tributes are getting a little long in the tooth.

I have to wonder why San Jose Jazz, which trumpets jazz education as one of its prime missions, isn't more imaginative. Why isn't it doing more to keep the jazz front and center, to present a deep roster of indisputably excellent and exciting jazz musicians and to keep the festival forward-directed by highlighting some of the many amazing up-and-coming players who dedicate their lives to the art form?

Tribute to Holloway

Because at some point - and the point already may be here - a jazz festival like this one starts to feel like a roll-out. We get a handful of aging players from the music's golden era alongside familiar faces (some of the same ones each year) and lots of tangential musicians, some better than others, whose relationship to jazz isn't always clear.

To be fair, there will be some dynamite players this year. A Main Stage tribute to saxophonist Red Holloway, who's turning 80, will feature Holloway and three other saxophone luminaries: Frank Morgan, Charles McPherson and Greg Osby. An all-star Latin band will include pianist Arturo O'Farrill, trumpeter Ray Vega and percussionists Steve Berrios and Pete Escovedo. Other stages will feature bassist David Friesen, trumpeters Eddie Gale and John Worley, trombonist Wayne Wallace and singer Jackie Ryan.

But compared to past years, the lineups look spotty, almost randomly assembled.

What's the vision here? Roach says he wants to "create this really fun community event, a musical event that people can come to and have fun." But isn't that what the festival has been for years? It's a huge block party. Great food. Good vibes. With lots of music on multiple stages - blues, salsa, Latin, R&B - but with jazz as the star of the show.

Roach said he wants to put an emphasis on "up-and-comers" in jazz. Great idea. I asked him to name some. He offered two: singers Denise Donatelli and Sasha Dobson. Fine. Can I suggest a few others?

There are many important young players who come from the Bay Area and, even if they've migrated to New York and elsewhere, often spend weeks here each summer. They include saxophonists Donny McCaslin (among the elite on his instrument, internationally) and Dayna Stevens (a protege of Wayne Shorter, he has an excellent new, all star-studded debut album) and trumpeters Ambrose Akinmusire and Jonathan Finlayson (both graduates of Berkeley High).

These are hot, innovative players - and fresh faces. Showcasing them with their own bands on the Main Stage would be a great idea. Or what if, with some planning, a couple of them were to form the front line of an all-star quintet with a Bay Area-bred rhythm section of bassist Larry Grenadier, pianist Taylor Eigsti and drummer Jeff Ballard?

The Bay Area is loaded with exceptional players who span jazz from straight-ahead to laptop-assisted and the acoustic avant-garde: drummers Scott Amendola, E.W. Wainwright, Steve Smith, Sameer Gupta and Zakir Hussain; pianist Myra Melford; clarinetist Ben Goldberg; guitarists Fred Frith and Henry Kaiser; saxophonists Howard Wiley and David Boyce; bassists Ray Drummond, Marcus Shelby and Cory Combs. Where are they on this lineup? And where is the Turtle Island String Quartet, which has a new recording of John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme?"

Synergy with Stanford

What about vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson and saxophonist John Handy? They're iconic jazz figures - and they live here. How about creating some synergy with the Stanford Jazz Workshop? Its summer faculty includes Kenny Barron, Lee Konitz, Eddie Gomez, Jimmy Cobb, Matt Wilson, Wycliffe Gordon, Eigsti, Stevens and Akinmusire. Would it have been impossible to bring a few of them to the festival? Why not work at some cooperation in coming years?

Roach points out - as he did this time last year - that the festival lineup isn't yet complete. Maybe some heavies still will sign on. Maybe the Airmen of Note will turn out to be a killing band. And maybe Gerald Albright will decide that it's time to show off his jazz chops by blazing through "Giant Steps." I hope so.

But right now, this festival lacks vision.

[RainyDay]

Thanks for posting this. I thought the talent was a little light. I didn't realize the lighter stuff was on the main stage. What an insult to the jazz artists. I had already blocked out vacation time for the festival but I think I'll go to Carmel or Napa and commune with nature instead.

[Paul B]

I agree, the lineup does seem lightweight.

And add Rova, Charlie Hunter, Peter Apfelbaum, Steve Bernstein, Kenny Brooks, and Hafez Modir to the list of world-renowned local talent, and the list would be more complete. Any and all of the people Scheinin mentions would beef things up considerably.

[Mike Schwartz]

My hunch is that when the San Jose Jazz Society beats the bushes for the $$$$$ needed to sponsor the whole thing (plus+ it's not a completely FREE weekend as it was), it's easier to put up the names in question in front of the check writers who think they are doing a good deed and "supporting a jazz festival" with those somewhat recognizable names.

How often in all of life's situations do we see the path of least resistance approach applied.

In the past, it may not have been cutting edge, but a damn fine weekend of music.

Lack of imaginatiion indeed....

I'll not be attending (KSJS will be involved again) and out of the country around that time.

[kedoane]

I'm not sure if I am attending or whether I'll be involved like I was in the previous years. I can get the time off, but since I am dealing with my mom, I can't really be thinking that much ahead.

[Ron Thorne]

While there are some very good musicians on that list, that hardly reads like a jazz festival list for any non-profit truly hoping to make any significant (musical) mark, or to even recoup their costs, for that matter.

Sad, but not surprising.

[Mike Schwartz]

I liked the piece Scheinin wrote in May more than this one, but he sums it up fairly, when it's all said & done. I went out on Sunday only, did my emcee duties for a *nice* but limited jazzy singer up from L.A. and a decent piano trio. Then caught the very acts that the reviewer liked most; parts of the Calloway, Santos, and Chuchito Valzez sets (he was inside the piano up to his chest when I arrived!!), the Alto Summit, with Red Holloway and Charles McPherson the tallest of the trees from my seat, too much of the Ritnour set where even the brilliant musicianship of Alex Acuña couldn't take this stuff out from being a soul_less excersize, and the outstanding Latin All Stars tribute to Hilton Ruiz, as well as Mario Rivera.

Had I gone on Saturday I had the Barbara Dennerlein set penciled in as a must see..........I played her on the show this past Sunday as I did the final hour of last week's show music from leaders and side-musicians that played the festival like Dennerlein, Holloway, McPherson, Denise Donetelli, John Santos, Gerri Allen, John DiMartino and others.



San Jose Jazz Festival: In search of jazz
TOP PERFORMERS ARE OVERWHELMED BY FESTIVAL'S POP ACTS
By Richard Scheinin
Mercury News
San Jose Mercury News
Article Launched:08/13/2007 02:25:18 PM PDT


Most years, when the San Jose Jazz Festival comes to an end, it feels as if summer camp has ended. There's sadness in the air.

This year, not so much. The three-day festival's 18th annual edition was the patchiest in years. There was little need to run from stage to stage, because there weren't enough acts worth running after. Significant jazz musicians under age 40, or even 50, were largely left out. And, too much of the time, pop acts ruled the Main Stage at San Jose's Plaza de Cesar Chavez, making me wonder which road this festival is going to travel in future years.

It was rescued at the end by a couple of sensational performances.

The Latin Jazz All-Stars, nominally led by the combustible trumpeter Ray Vega and with legendary conguero Armando Peraza as special guest, turned the plaza into a dance party as the festival wrapped up Sunday night. Earlier Sunday, an alto saxophone summit (Red Holloway, Charles McPherson, Frank Morgan and Greg Osby) kept diving into the blues, playing them the way the blues were played when the blues were the blues, if you know what I mean. It was a brand of jazz that predates corporate sponsorships, of which this festival has an increasing number.

Are corporate sponsorships influencing festival programming? I can't say. I understand that the festival needs underwriters, that the music doesn't pay for itself. And like a lot of people, I wonder why the city of San Jose, which has given millions of dollars to fortify the Grand Prix, can't find the bucks to help sustain this festival, which, after all, is only the city's biggest annual cultural event. About 88,000 people attended over the weekend.

But I don't really think the Comcast San Jose Jazz Festival's problem is lack of money so much as lack of vision. Its producer, non-profit San Jose Jazz (formerly known as the San Jose Jazz Society), touts the promotion of jazz performance and education as its mission. Whenever the festival ends up in the black, that money gets pumped into the society's jazz education programs for young people.

So tell me why saxophonist Gerald Albright's thumping "smooth jazz" was headlining the Main Stage on Saturday, and why guitarist Lee Ritenour was up there Sunday, with his keyboardist, Patrice Rushen, leading a mass singalong on her pop-funk hit "Forget Me Nots." Because when San Jose Jazz teaches young people about jazz, or teaches them to play jazz, the curriculum focuses on Parker and Coltrane, never Albright and Ritenour.

You have to wonder what the agenda is here. The festival always has offered a musical mix - blues, salsa, world music, R&B - but the "jazz" in the festival's title was always squarely at center stage. It didn't seem to be a problem; the festival drew enormous crowds with James Moody or Jimmy Heath as headliners.

But San Jose Jazz and its executive director, Geoff Roach, seem to be engineering a change. This is the second year that the festival, which used to be free and now charges $5 a head per day, has put a big push behind major pop acts on the Main Stage. If it happens for another year or two, that's what people will expect, and this won't really be much of a jazz festival.

Of course, the music - jazz, I mean - is strong, and if you were persistent enough to scour the past weekend's schedule, you could still hear some excellent performers.

Listening to German organist Barbara Dennerlein's swirling lines, I felt like a cat in the sun. Vocalist Jackie Ryan, whose lustrous voice stirs memories of Sarah Vaughan, was a joy, as was saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman, whose band included trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, a secret master of the music. Over at the Rep, free-jazz trumpeter Eddie Gale brought along a group featuring earth-vibration bassist William Parker.

The Latin Jazz stage was an oasis: Bands led by percussionist John Santos and flutist John Calloway were among the weekend's best, at once slick and gritty and inspiring crowds of dancers. One couple, dancing a cha-cha, kissed in sync to Calloway's double-tongued flute solos.

I'll keep that vision in my festival memory bank, while trying to forget that most of this year's jazz acts were decidedly middle-of-the-road. Why have the festival's programmers essentially ignored the past 35 years worth of developments in the music? Why have they tapped so few important players in their 20s and 30s who live not only in New York but right in the Bay Area?

But let's end on a happy note, with alto saxophonist Morgan, one of Charlie Parker's heirs. He's 73 and slowing down, I guess, so he played while seated at Sunday's summit performance. But, oh, how he played: Morgan floated and fluttered, butterfly-soft and soulful as can be, through "All the Things You Are" and showed all the things that jazz can be.

[kedoane]

Well, I didn't make it out to the jazz fest. this year since my mom is very ill.

If things get settled down at home and work, I may work the jazz fest. next year for KSJS. I am taking things easy for now.

[Pete C]

I remember Scheinin when he was a WKCR DJ in the early 70s.

[Surfer]

I went last Sat night to the Paragon to see a friend in a guitar trio. It wasnt part of the official SJ jazz fest, but they were still pretty good. Nice sitting outside in the adjacent courtyard. There were a ton of people downtown, not sure I've ever seen so many people milling around. Even if the music sucked overall, good for SJ, they really need to try to drag people downtown.

[Mike Schwartz]

SJ has terminal cluelessness so far as attracting people to downtown.
They'll continue to allow the *developers* in this area to get rich with one Santana Row after another, NONE in the downtown area.

They are quite good at staging events like Jazz Fest and others, and have sunk a fortune into the Grand Prix, but have little or nothing to offer throughout the year.

If I were one of the flock that I see scurrying about downtown at misc, trade meets, I'd wonder what the hell is up with this place that's billed as #10 largest city in the USA with little happening at night, including a decent movie theater.

[Surfer]

Yup, agreed with all that.

I was astonished how many people were downtown, around the Fairmont plaza. Felt like an actual city.