Jazz Big and Small

Here in the states, the Monterey Jazz Festival (MJF) rates as one of America’s oldest and most loved music events around.  Held on 20 acres of the Monterey County Fairgrounds, up to 500 jazz artists perform over the festival’s long late September weekend. 

For musicians, Monterey is a place, very much like Carnegie Hall, that says you’ve arrived. Since it began in 1958, there’s not an iconic name in jazz that hasn’t played MJF.  Armstrong, Ellington, Sinatra, Ella, and Miles have been succeeded by Aaron Diehl, Diane Reeves, Kurt Elling and Gregory Porter.  And for all the naysayers who’ve written off jazz as a passé music form stuck in another age, Monterey has always been one of the places you go to learn that just ain’t so.  Refusing to lock the music into a rigid replication of the past, those leading the festival welcome artists who stretch jazz’s boundaries to create something innovative and fresh.

2006 saw the festival hit its peak attendance with 40,000 jazz fans swarming Monterey’s oak filled expanse.  Like most festivals with a little history under its belt, many of the people flocking to MJF’s siren call have been showing up for years. Even decades. Many of them talk about coming to the festival with their parents and how they’re compelled to make the festival an essential piece of their life.

How planners would handle not hosting the festival on the fairgrounds this year posed the typical pandemic fueled problem and organizers made the expected accommodations to support a virtual event. Several live Zoom powered performances beautifully highlighted the young and the new.  But it was the archival footage that proliferated and allowed the world to savor the treasures festival visitors have been relishing for the last 63 years. The underlying “come, see and listen” message remained the same.  And despite having to gather online, the takeaway still resonated:  Monterey is one of those rare places where exceptional artists converge to showcase quintessentially American music. 

Presented online Friday Sept 25 through Sunday the 27^t, the virtual Monterey Jazz Festival is still available through subscription at https://montereyjazzfestival.org.

A much smaller, but arguably equally vital festival was held over the same weekend in Chicago. The Hyde Park Jazz Festival, an established and respected annual neighborhood event, focused exclusively on home grown talent this year as it paid homage to jazz’s many facets.  And not to be deterred by a contagion, Kate Dumbleton and her army of volunteers were even able to host live events at venues studded throughout Hyde Park’s collegial setting. 

But it was an off shoot of the main festival that caught our attention because of its back-to-the-roots feel, raw authenticity and sense of taking the music back home.  This is the third year the Hyde Park Jazz Society has sponsored its annual Back Alley Jazz series that carries the music to people’s homes and onto their sidewalks and driveways.  Held on Chicago’s south side, where absolute normalcy exists side by side with other urban realities, a host of the city’s veteran high caliber talent enchanted Chicago’s Black citizenry and other jazz lovers of various stripes.