Soulful Survivors

Horn of Plenty: Wynton Marsalis blows into town for the 52nd annual Monterey Jazz Festival.

Making some joyful noize at MJF52.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

“IF YOU WANT TO HEAR THE SPIRIT OF JAZZ, LISTEN TO KIND OF BLUE.” --Herbie Hancock

The 52nd annual Monterey Jazz Festival features something old – folksinging legend Pete Seeger (90), perennial cool cat Dave Brubeck (88) and the triumphant return of Return To Forever; something new – rising vocalist/bassist Esperanza Spalding, gospel-trained songstress Lizz Wright and Global Noize, co-produced by DJ Logic and Jason Miles; something “borrowed” – Wynton Marsalis’ Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra; and something blue – Conrad Herwig’s Latin Side All-Star Band, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’ classic Kind of Blue and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps.

This year’s sumptuous offerings are neatly bookended with the Miles/’Trane tributes and the appearance of Brubeck – his 15th appearance at the festivval – honoring the 50th anniversary of Time Out, the recording that catapulted jazz into the mainstream.

Taken together, the Kind of Blue, Time Out and Giant Steps sessions constitute a remarkable tribute to the staying power of great music. There’s a reason the Monterey Jazz Festival has lasted, and even thrived, for the 50 years since it was co-founded by Jimmy Lyons and Ralph J. Gleason. (Not that the festival is immune to the current economic woes – in a break with tradition, tickets to the Main Arena are still on sale as the event prepares to open.)

As just noted, it certainly isn’t the money – most of these artists don’t make in a lifetime what American Idol clears in a season. Or the fame. Yes, Miles Davis cultivated a persona that outscaled the tight confines of jazz clubs into the kind of brand recognition that gets you into Gap ads, Coltrane inspired a cult of musical and spiritual acolytes alike and Brubeck – well, Dave has managed to carve out one of the most enduring careers in American music without ever making too much of himself. Wisely, he’s kept his concentration on his work – Ansel Adams: America, co-written with his son, Chris, is the Monterey Symphony’s opening night attraction this season. And this December, he’s being honored at the Kennedy Center, along with Bruce Springsteen and Robert De Niro.

The trio of masterpieces being honored at MJF52 deserve the kudos.

Giant Steps marked the apex of Coltrane’s “sheets of sound,” chord-running prowess, before he plunged into the spirit music of A Love Supreme.

Time Out featured classics like Paul Desmond’s “Take Five,’’ unusual time signatures and Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo a la Turk.” Half a century later, it’s still a significant part of the jazz canon.

But Kind of Blue is in a class of its own.

Here’s Quincy Jones on the subject: “I play [it] every day – it’s my orange juice. It still sounds like it was made yesterday.”

Davis’ moody modal magic combined with Bill Evans’ still, meditative piano, Cannonball Adderley, Coltrane, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, on tunes like “So What,” “All Blues” and “Freddie the Freeloader’’ came together in a whole that was much more than the sum of its collective parts.

It’s an album that can be listened to over and over and over, revealing new dimensions, surprising and moving and opening whoever’s on the receiving end to a universe of infinite possibilities, like a great painting, or a late-night conversation with an old friend. Everything old becomes new again.

Vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson once said that Miles “didn’t play the trumpet like a trumpet, he played it like a voice… He played these really beautiful, sweet, sensitive lines.”

“I’m always looking for a new tonality, somewhere, somehow,” Davis told San Francisco Chronicle jazz scribe Jesse Hamlin in 1984. “New tones, new sounds. That’s what I’m looking for.”

In that spirit, it will be exciting to hear what trombonist Conrad Herwig and the Latin Side All-Star band, with special guests Lovana and Brecker, do by way of re-interpreting the classic. Miles never liked standing still.

“I love challenges and new things,’’ he wrote, with trademark insouciance, in his 1989 autobiography, co-authored with poet Quincy Troupe. “When I hear jazz musicians today playing all those same licks we used to play so long ago, I feel sad for them. I mean, it’s like going to bed with a real old person who even smells real old. Now, I’m not putting down old people because I’m getting older myself. But to be honest, that’s what it reminds me of… I have to always be on the cutting edge of things because that’s just the way I am and have always been.”

His controversial ventures into fusion, which enraged traditionalist keepers of the flame like Wynton Marsalis, who once described Davis as “a genius who decided to go into rock, and was on the bandstand looking like, basically a buffoon” was of a piece with his career-long skills as a talent scout. Despite his well-earned reputation for irascibility, Davis gathered together some of the greatest successive groups in jazz history, from the still-unsurpassed Kind of Blue combo to his collaborations with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams.

One of his prized late ’60s sidemen was Chick Corea, who will be revisiting Monterey this year with Return to Forever sidekicks Lenny White and Stanley Clarke.

In their totally different ways, Davis and Marsalis served the cause of jazz education (though Miles would never have copped to it), bringing in new listeners and teaching younger audiences about what had come before, and ways of bridging the gap into the future.

That role is a key part of the Jazz Festival mission.

As MJF general manager Tim Jackson recently acknowledged in an interview on the San Mateo-based jazz station KCSM-FM, attracting audiences, and artists, in this recessionary age “certainly hasn’t gotten easier. We have to make a big statement, to keep our marketing viability. There are still lots of artists who want to play Monterey, but looking at a festival of our size [we need] marquee all-star names that everybody recognizes – Wynton, Tony Bennett. Names that people can kind of hang their hat on. When they ask you, ‘Who’s playing this year?’ – people say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve heard of them… It’s a great door-opener.”

Jackson added that the festival has been working for years to broaden the appeal of the only home-grown American art form “with our educational program, which is part and parcel of what we do and vital to survival. We develop the jazz musicians for the future, but we also hope to build the jazz consumers of tomorrow. Let’s face it, most kids in our education program won’t go on to be professional musicians, but let’s hope they hold on to the skills they use throughout their life, supporting the jazz ecosystem.

“We’re drawing from artists with great educational credentials,” Jackson said, citing Marsalis. “If anybody loves to teach people, it’s Wynton. He’s a great presence.”

It’s doubtful that Jackson checked in with Marsalis before booking some of the intentionally more experimental, youthful acts like Esperanza Spalding and Lizz Wright for the festival’s “New Grooves” night, let alone the funk, fusion and world music mash-up sounds of the Global Noize collective.

Wynton might be more at peace with the sounds of piano phenom Jason Moran, who will be premiering “Feedback,’’ a piece commissioned for the Festival, or the opening night performance by the Monterey Jazz Festival All-Stars, featuring Kenny Barron, Regina Carter, Kurt Elling and Russell Malone.

But to borrow an over-used modern mantra, it’s all good.

Jackson, who assumed the Festival helm from Jimmy Lyons in 1993, stressed the importance of building new audiences.

“People have been in the same arena seats for years and years. We’re now in our 52nd year, but even at our 50th anniversary, we saw that some people were at an age where they felt it just wasn’t comfortable for them to make it every year.

“This is a transition period. People say it’s hard to get a ticket, but I’ve got news for you. This year, there’s plenty of tickets.”