ON the Beat | A New Jazz Gospel According to Monterey

This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on October 3, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox on Fridays, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

I was happily lurking in the “food court” zone of the Monterey Jazz Festival last weekend, awaiting my BBQ Tri-Tip sandwich from Cre’s, which I knew would not disappoint. It’s a tradition here at the Monterey Jazz Festival, which I’ve religiously attended for more years than I should admit to. There, between the outdoor Garden Stage and the West End Stage, an accidental multi-sensory, multicultural mash-up greeted and massaged my ears, to the concurrent tunes of Native American Julia Keefe’s Indigenous Jazz Ensemble and the ecstatic-elastic grooves of Afro-Cuban master Pedrito Martinez’ group.

The aural double-play seemed a fitting hybrid hookup for this willfully diverse festival, seeking to touch on the necessarily disparate threads, grooves and genres under the current jazz umbrella. The Monterey County Fairgrounds is duly transformed into a jazz village for a September weekend each year, and as you move from one outdoor stage to the other, some sonic overlap is both inevitable and instructively emblematic at this fest.

This year’s festival — proudly and rightly touted as the oldest continuous jazz festival in the world — is number 67 and arrives with a new director, Darin Atwater, only the third in the festival’s history, after founder Jimmy Lyons and the inspired Tim Jackson. Jackson helmed the fest into a broader artistic embrace over his memorably 32-year stint at the head.

On the evidence of last weekend’s unusually dense roster of music, the Washington D.C.-based Atwater is the right person for the gig. In his first year, Atwater extends Jacksonian ideals with the festival, while subtly inserting his own interest in deeper inclusivity, touches of his orchestral interest (as with the “Eastwood Symphonic” — son Kyle paying romantic tribute to his father Clint’s film music, with the Monterey Symphony in tow, with longtime MJF supporter Clint sitting six rows from the stage) and a refreshing thematic focus on Black gospel music.

Interestingly, this year’s festival also had more lateral connections to Santa Barbara — beyond the extant lure of a world-class festival in a beautiful locale and in doable driving distance. In the main arena venue, we heard the old-new young phenom Samara Joy, who played the Granada last year, gospel-soul royalty Mavis Staples (coming to the Arlington next Tuesday, October 8 with acclaimed gospel act The War and Treaty), fusion-powered crowd pleaser Hiromi and Sonicwonderland (making her Santa Barbara debut on April 25) and keyboardist-multi-talent Robert Glasper (headed to the Lobero Theatre on January 5). The organically virtuosic Hurst’s Sunday night “commissioned work” wove an entrancing path through R&B, hip hop, and jazz channels, and showcased guest Yebba.

Speaking of the Lobero, I ran into ever-affable MJF regulars David Asbell and his wife Denise Dannemiller at the set by Don Was’ Pan-Detroit Ensemble, which thoroughly dazzled the crowd at the Lobero just last week, on its way north. Lobero director Asbell acknowledged that Was’s Santa Barbara show was almost twice as long as Monterey’s. Bragging rights are deserved.

My personal festival highlight, the critically beloved tenor saxist-conceptualist James Brandon Lewis, brought his Red Lily Quintet to the Garden Stage late on Sunday night (see video here). In sharp contrast to the free-thinking and rethinking Mahalia Jackson tribute of this group, the lucky 805-ers among us flocked to Ojai’s Deer Lodge a month ago to hear him play with the punk-jazz-roadhouse group Mezzthetics. Vibist Joel Ross, who brought his bold group Good Vibes to the festival, played two weeks ago at Santa Barbara’s intrepid Piano Kitchen and earlier this year with the Blue Note roadshow at Campbell Hall — probably the finest local jazz concert this year.   

Could it be that Santa Barbara is awakening from his jazz-resistant slumber? MJF 2024 served to remind us of locally-connected tentacles to the wider jazz world of late.

There were strong moments in the main arena — including a powerful and poignant set by African-American singer Somi (she gets my vote for an artist who needs to be tapped by local concert presenters). Her prayerful ballad and tribute to her immigrant mother, “Holy Room,” brought the crowd to tears and a mid-set standing ovation. As she closed with deep breathing, three seagulls flew overhead and contributed their song to the moment: thereafter, the crowd applauded whenever gulls passed over. A magical, epiphanic moment, to be sure.

But generally speaking, to these ears at least, the strongest music on the program was not in the arena but on the smaller “side stages.” Stanley Clarke’s retro fusion bombast drew the crowds, but I had to leave early to catch the fascinating alternative electric jazz trio Harriett Tubman at the West End. Underappreciated guitarist Brandon Ross is a distinctive electric guitarist, favoring yearning, legato lines  — flecked with some of the subtlest vibrato bar colorations this side of Jeff Beck — over the bullying bravado we too often hear from plugged-in guitarists. Structures laid down with bassist Melvin Gibbs and drummer JT Lewis remain open to re-invention.

This was a very good year for trios establishing new personal standards of musical vision and elasticity, between Harriet Tubman, Jason Moran’s Bandwagon, and the stunning Tarbaby (underrated master pianist Orrin Evans, bassist Eric Revis and drummer Nasheet Waits — also part of Bandwagon). To that list, we can add two high-flying and globally important Los Angelenos — the trio led by pianist Gerald Clayton (along with Moran, a pianist for local celebrity Charles Lloyd) and the much-heralded alto saxophonist David Binney, whose Friday performance — featuring spidery-cool drummer Zach Danziger — spun rings of artful delight and adrenaline around our heads.
        
In another sonic overlap moment last weekend, Lewis’ strikingly moving gospel-jazz-chamber-free improv set on Sunday was occasionally punctuated by the radically different and much louder sound of guitar heroine Ana Popovic’s Fantastafunk Big Band show over at the West End. But the clashing points of focus were pre-forgiven. It’s all in a weekend’s very busy work at the MJF, a musical feast and a sacred site for America’s greatest indigenous art form.

David Binney (left) and Brandee Younger, Monterey Jazz Festival 2024 | Credit: Josef Woodard

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To-Doings:

Manhattan Transfer may be officially retired, as we were reminded by their Lobero Theatre retirement tour stop earlier this year, but Transfer vocalist Janis Siegel continues to make her own way forward as a solo artist. In an alluring match-up of act and venue, Siegel appears at the mythic Bellosguardo Estate on Monday, October 7, with pianist Yaron Gershovsky with the program (recently released on CD), “The Colors of My Life: A Cy Coleman Songbook.” Info here.

This weekend offers a juicy double-play of important classical concerts involving sopranos who happen to be Black. On Friday, revered soprano Julia Bullock gives the eagerly-awaited performance of Olivier Messiaen’s moving song cycle Harawi at Campbell Hall, hosted by UCSB Arts & Lectures in conjunction with the Ojai Music Festival (see story here). Saturday night at Hahn Hall, the Music Academy of the West’s Mariposa Series kicks off with soprano Karen Slack’s intriguing and thematic “African Queens” program, of mostly newly-commissioned pieces. (See story here).

And in another corner of the cultural spectrum — and a whole ‘nother corner of the Santa Barbara County real estate — head over to the always spirit-renewing Stow House in Goleta for the 52nd annual Old-Time Fiddlers Festival (formerly the Old-Time Fiddler’s Convention). Have heapin’ helping of bluegrass, pre-bluegrass and old-timey music in a generous historic slice of old Goleta, a fine way to spend an autumnal Saturday, October 5. Info here.