With his Cannery Row Suite, California’s piano master pays homage to the writer, the place and the people.

“Monterey was not a town to let dishonor come to a literary man.” So wrote John Steinbeck in his 1945 novel Cannery Row. And for the last five decades, Monterey has also done pretty well by its musical men and women.

So it’s about time that the Muses make the three-mile trek from Cannery Row to the Monterey Fairgrounds, home of the Monterey Jazz Festival, to link these two forms of artistic expression.

After all, the old Cannery Row of the book and the Fairgrounds of MJF have things in common. They’ve both been peopled by eccentric and creative characters who’ve overcome barriers of convention, and the sometimes adverse winds of change, to further a shared vision.

Consider the founding of the Festival in 1958 by the late Jimmy Lyons, a crusty scrapper not totally unlike Cannery Row’s Mack. A year earlier, Lyons was living in Big Sur, south of Monterey, and broadcasting jazz over KDON out of Salinas, Steinbeck’s hometown. With modest investments from a few of the station’s sponsors, Lyons enlisted his progressive pianistic pal Dave Brubeck to perform at a meeting of the Monterey City Council to help him sell the risky idea of a jazz festival.

Brubeck recalls that appearance by his quartet, which featured the attractively cool saxophonist Paul Desmond, but hadn’t yet waxed its million-selling LP, Time Out. At the Fairgrounds in ‘57, “We played in a whitewashed cement floor place where they showed vegetables, or maybe animals. And the council was sitting there on wooden chairs.” How did that small, select audience react? “They liked it! And that’s how we got permission to do a festival.” It began the following year, on the Fairgrounds’ main stage.