Farewell to a Behind-the-Scenes Festival Legend, Monterey Jazz Festival at 66

This year's model of the Monterey jazz festival, now up to its 66th annual, felt overall like one of the strongest and most balanced of the past decade. Salient highlights included a stunning African-flavored commissioned work, Isakoso Ara, from Ambrose Akinmusire—one of the proudest products of this festival over many years—along with a saucy and artful three-show focus on guitar great John Scofield, a strong Garden Stage set by lateral thinking pianist-composer Kris Davis, memorable sets from jazz chanteuse phenom contender Samara Joy, and the dazzling new pianism from James Francies and James Francies, and James Francies.

From the exciting "chordless" band corner, we had Christian McBride's unexpectedly raw-fired New Jawn and the lean firepower of Kendrick Scott's Corridors (with Chris Potter issuing some of the boldest tenor sax work of the weekend). As if to lean into the jazz future, the festival closed auspiciously on Sunday night with inspiring new blood bassist-vocalist-jazz rethinker Thundercat (powered by fiery-funky drummer Justin Brown). And the list goes on...

All that said, however, one major distinguishing mark this year related to a powerful and inherently influential behind-the-scenes star. MJF 2023 marks the year that inspired director Tim Jackson has announced his retirement, after 32 years in that seat. It must be duly recognized that Jackson took over the reins of the festival from founding director Jimmy Lyons in 1992, and turned the world's oldest continuously run jazz festival into one of the world's greatest festivals.

Before the official musical portion of Friday's opening night set by Terence Blanchard, Jackson responded to the first of many kudos and presentations over the weekend, saying "it has been an incredible pleasure for me to stand on this stage for three days a year—for decades—and feel your energy."

Jackson's tenure has been marked by an open-eared appreciation of jazz—inside and out, mainstream and marginal, progressive and party-fueled—and an uncommon skill for juggling diverse demographic tastes and care for the art form. Clearly, he will be missed and his vision as a festival designer deserves to be replicated/borrowed.

All in all, the roster for this three-night/two-day jazz institution once again realized what seems to be MJF's curatorial mantra: jazz is an ever-evolving and multi-dimensional cultural organism. Festivals such as this one can validate and help nurture such a complex identity and show us a rousingly good time in the process.

That delicate balance of musical intelligence and will to uplift—even to spur the dance impulse—was central to Akinmusire's new commissioned work, Isakoso Ara, which succeeded at what he described in an interview as striving to inspire "people to move around and to celebrate—to just move their bodies after having such a long period of not moving...at the same time, I was thinking a lot about my, my own heritage as, as a Nigerian and West African."

In sharp contrast to his more introspective commissioned piece from 2015, The Forgotten Places, Isakoso Ara was pumped up with rhythmic fervor and African-derived vibes, with no less an African musical deity than the great Mali-an vocalist Oumou Sangaré—who he called his "favorite singer—" in the spotlight. As expected Sangare's parts were magisterial, enchanting and expressively fluid, set against a thrumming and undulating ensemble backdrop and some disarming twists of harmonic shifts and other elements in the score and its generous margins for spontaneous combustion.

Akinmusire's trumpet improvisations were tasteful and true to his measured virtuosity, but the real accent was on the sum effect, the communal energy so critical to West African music. Akinmusire has come with an ear-opening and fresh variation on the tradition of "Afro-jazz" aesthetics, hopefully the start of yet another channel of his broad musical vision.

Speaking of West African origins, aside from Scofield, the guitarist with the most ample and varied stage time was Benin-born Lionel Loueke, always a pleasure to hear—especially when he plays with a pure tone unadulterated by his impure digital additives. The organically virtuosic Loueke showed up all over the fairground compound: on the West End stage with his empathic project partner Gretchen Parlato; in another fruitful partnership, with prodigiously creative flutist Elena Pinderhughes (an artist with deep Monterey connections) on the Garden stage; and in the bright lights and big stage setting of the main arena with his longtime bandleader Herbie Hancock.

Hancock, whose band also now includes trumpeter Terrence Blanchard and the dynamic young drummer Terrence Blanchard (remember that name) along with trusty and grounding bassist James Genus, is a true octogenarian trooper. Hancock has been a ubiquitous fixture on the festival and jazz concert scene lately, and it made sense that his familiar funk, jazz and retro-rolling medicine show landed here in Jackson's swan song episode.

Blanchard himself served as the festival opener in the arena, presenting a compacted retrospective of his life of musical ventures, which has taken him from his jazz center to film composition and now the grand operatic limelight of the Metropolitan Opera. Dubbed "See Me as I Am," Blanchard's rangy set featured his own current group, E-Current and the jazz-friendly Turtle Island String Quartet, with a cameo by Dianne Reeves (who also performed her own set on Saturday evening and showed up in the impressive all-female brigade of Terri Lyne Carrington & New Standards on Sunday afternoon).

Samara Joy's appearance here resembled other festival profiles for the suddenly meteorically risen singer: a year ago, she instantly won new fans on the smaller West End Stage, in a marginal late Friday afternoon set. This year, after her remarkable and flexible talent has been anointed with global hosannas and a Best New Artist of the Year Grammy, she took to and easily commanded the main arena stage, with her extravagant yet somehow personal vocal presence. The crowd couldn't help itself from a standing ovation or two, even on the sophisticated new arrangement and lyric on Charles Mingus' "Reincarnation of a Love Bird." It's not appropriate by this point to say the twenty-something Joy is "going places." She has gone many places, "arrived" by many standards, and scaled great heights in the past year, with a formidable future in store.

Another Monterey festival heritage moment came in the form of Charles Lloyd's quartet, making one of the saxophonist's periodic appearances in this festival which, in a real way, helped his career ascend to mythic and demographic-crossing proportions. It was Lloyd's 1966 appearance here, in his band featuring emerging piano icon Keith Jarrett, that Lloyd's recording of the piece "Forest Flower" caught on like wildfire in the jazz market and spilling over into pop/hippy/counterculture circles in the late '60s and beyond.

Lloyd has largely avoided playing that particular "greatest hit" in the recent long chapter of his musical life, but its return as the culminating tune of his latest Monterey set bristled with nostalgia and perhaps a personal favor to the outgoing director Jackson. This time out, his band represented layers of his own personnel shifts in recent years: bassist Reuben Rogers had the deepest roots, while the brilliant and sometimes scene-stealing pianist Gerald Clayton is his latest starring piano foil. The drum chair was occupied by a newcomer to the role, Kendrick Scott, whose flexibility allowed him to fit in nicely, although with a more mainstream approach than other drummers in this chair.

Lloyd, renowned and much respected as a jazz elder by now—including NEA Jazz Master status—had bluster and a few surprises in store, as when, on the famous resolving two-hit figure ending "Forest Flower," the penultimate note was a half-step higher than we expected. It was a clever gotcha moment from a lively musically sage.

Given the festival's finger-on-the-pulse programming agenda during the Jackson era, it was a bit surprising to learn that Scofield was making his first appearance here in 15 years. But the kindly guitar legend made up for some lost time by appearing as the festival's "showcase artist" in three separate contexts—plus a special pre-festival gala concert and the screening of "Inside Scofield," an illuminating new documentary by German director Joerg Steineck (and one of the best jazz films I've ever seen—both artfully made and true to the artist's story and essence).

Friday evening's Sco fodder came in the form of Scary Goldings, the playful, partying—but partying with pockets of seriousness in tow—six-piece group featuring the eminent and witty organist and longtime Scofield ally Larry Goldings, the thinking-funk outfit MonoNeon, and electric bassist Tal Wilkenfeld. Wilkenfeld's nimble but ever-tasteful playing served the perfect alliance with another guitar wonder, Jeff Beck, and beautifully suits Scofield's house blend of grit, wit and jazz fiber. Among the memorable party favor ditties in the set: "'80s TV Theme," "Cornish Hen," "Day Old Socks" and "Louis Cole Sucks" (written by Louis Cole). The song titles themselves hint at the group's rubbery wiseguy sound.

On Saturday, Scofield took to the main stage with his group Yankee Go Home, tapping into his recent delving into nostalgic pop-rock cover material and life as a hip guitar wizardly uncle figure in the jamband scene, also touched on with his new album Uncle John's Band (ECM, 2023). His group, featuring organist-keyboardist Jon Cowherd, regular bassist ally Vicente Archer and drummer Josh Dion (also a fine singer, on the Grateful Dead's obscure "Black Muddy Water"), is a thinking person's groove machine with extra grease and retro-roadhouse qualities. Much of the set was devoted to "songs from the 20th century," Scofield told the crowd and said "If you don't know them, ask the old person next to you."

On the playlist were "Mr. Tambourine Man" (the opening track of his new ECM album), Jimmy Webb's masterpiece "Wichita Lineman," and Hall and Oates' "I Can't Go For That," all reshaped and reinvented into Scofield-ian forms.

Come Sunday evening, Scofield put in one of the festival's strongest shows, by his lonesome (with the help of a few pedals). His ability to make the solo guitar format work, with some select looping and effects-spicing, became apparent on his strikingly fine "pandemic" project John Scofield (ECM, 2022). In the intimate Pacific Jazz Café venue in Monterey, Scofield wended through a handful of standards done up in his identifiable fashion—"My One and Only Love," "Blue in Green," a fingerstyle take on "My Funny Valentine," "Alfie"—along with such excursions into such pop gems as John Lennon's "Julia" and an inside-out "Louie Louie," replete with a mini-lecture on that song's curious back story.

Realizing that he was going on, verbally, he joked "the concert's over, right?" But that is one of Scofield's charms: he has a warm and fuzzy interaction with the audience, making serious music in his own sweet and salty way, but recognizing that the setting and the listening body are part of the cultural equation. He's one of us, or so we feel.

In some way, that special mix of serious musical appreciation and nurturing, graced with a casual/affable vibe around the microcosm that is the Monterey County Fairgrounds for a weekend each year also reflects the long, fruitful stretch of Jacksonian years at MJF. As he accepted DownBeat's "Lifetime Achievement" award onstage on the final evening, Jackson had a well-deserved moment in the spotlight celebrating his role as an important figure in jazz, an organizational life of a party with some deep and historic cultural implications.

All involved, on all sides of the stage, are rooting for a continuation of MJF's healthy recipe under the watch of Jackson's hand-picked successor, Darin Atwater.

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