By Forrest Bryant
San Jose is full of surprises. It's a major American city — more populous even than San Francisco, its flashy neighbor to the north. But in many ways it is also the sleepy town of 40 years ago, when the area now called Silicon Valley produced apricots and oranges rather than circuits and software. There isn't much nightlife here; for most of the year, the native jazz scene is confined to a handful of hotel lounges and upscale restaurants. Who would guess that this city, which a local columnist recently described as "a little urban and a lot suburban," would host the largest free Jazz Festival in the United States year after year? It does. For a full weekend in mid-August, downtown San Jose divides into 8 staging areas and welcomes an estimated 100,000 jazz buffs to the AT&T San Jose Jazz Festival. This year's event saw a number of changes, some good and some questionable, that reflected the nature of its hometown: ever-growing but still thinking small.
The 2001 festival kicked off with a bang, as the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra took the main stage in Cesar Chavez Plaza. Bassist Shelby is one of the brightest stars of the San Francisco scene, proving equally adept as the leader of a trio, a big band, and a record label since moving up from L.A. in the mid 90's. His big-band concept is Ellingtonian, in both his arrangements and his taste for extended compositions. After warming up the audience with an assortment of big band standards, the 15-piece ensemble took off with a number of excellent Shelby originals, many of which can be found on their recently released CD, The Lights Suite (on Noir Records).
At the heart of Shelby's set was a darkly pulsing three-part suite called "Random Abstract" that lay somewhere between the Duke's earthy marvels of the 1960s and Charles Mingus' angst-ridden hard swing. Compositions by those two composers provided the other big highlights of the afternoon. A quick, hard-hitting arrangement of Mingus' "Hora Decubitus" was spiked home by the fiery baritone sax of Tom Griesser and Mike Olmos' blazing trumpet. And Ellington's early classic "The Mooche" was given a royal treatment with a rumbling jungle groove and some great twisty trombone work by Dana DeLeon. Also worthy of note was alto saxophonist Theo "Hurricane" Kirk, who wowed 'em with a sultry, tropicalized solo on Shelby's own "Maia".
The Main Stage was a very nice venue — if you could get near it. The 200 or so chairs in front of the stage were for festival patrons only: a strictly enforced policy, even though these seats were mostly empty throughout the afternoon. If one lacked the pink armband of an insider, and failed to claim a patch of lawn space before noon, the main stage may as well have been in Timbuktu. I endured the jostling crowd on the periphery as long as I could, but the sight of a man on crutches being ejected from the sparsely populated seating area was enough to send me looking for a more audience-friendly venue.
The "Women in Jazz" stage certainly wasn't it. In the past, this stage was outdoors like all the others, offering plenty of room for the audience and inviting people to wander past. This year, the stage was wedged into the cozy confines of the Club Ibex on Market Street. Don't get me wrong; the Ibex is a fabulous room for live jazz. But it's tiny. This may be a plus for a regular show, but it's a mistake for a festival setting. When I attempted to catch Dena DeRose's set on Saturday afternoon, the room was jammed from wall to wall, past the bar and clear to the front door. There was no entering, little exiting, and those crammed in near the door probably didn't hear much.
The lucky handful that made it to the Ibex's tables, however, were in for a treat. DeRose splits her time between New York and the Bay Area, and her annual California stay always yields some great shows. She's excellent with both of her instruments (voice and piano), and her jazz chops are a refreshing change from the "pop singer doing standards" blandness that marks so many other pianist/vocalists. In any case, my own experience of this stage would have to wait until the next day.
On to part 2 of San Jose Notebook
