Today's Jazz - Internet Radio

Monterey Jazz boasts big faire
A couple hours south of Berkeley by car, the West Coast’s longest-running jazz festival—at 49, the longest-running in the same location in the world—is gearing up to swing the weekend of Sept. 15-17, on the Monterey County Fairgrounds. The county fair aspect of the Monterey Jazz Festival is often a surprise to first-time attendees, especially those used to the auditorium or coliseum setting for music festivals. It’s enhanced by the more than half dozen clubs and open-air stages outside the Arena, where the succesion of headliners are featured, as well as simulcasting of the shows from the Arena stage. And the Grounds Pass, for as little as $30 a day—all afternoon and evening on Saturday and Sunday—is a remarkable deal for those who’d prefer to stroll from venue to venue and dig the mix of the scene and the range of music in an atmosphere more festive than the more traditional (and expensive) Arena, and the site for appearances by names and talents as big as those headlined within. But the Arena shows often prove to be one time only events, like this year’s Sunday night show promises to be. Dave Brubeck, 85, who went from growing up on a Central Valley ranch to becoming one of the most popular jazz artists ever (and that due in great part to the response of university students to his hit album, Take Five), will preside at the ivories as his Quartet premieres his “Cannery Row Suite,” commissioned by the Jazz Festival. Besides being a role model to countless jazz pianists and composers, Brubeck’s literally a patriarch of the music: his sons frequently accompany him, and one of them—Chris Brubeck—will bring his own group, Triple Play, to the Garden Stage on the Grounds Sunday afternoon.

James Brown at LA Jazz Festival?
James Brown as headliner in the climactic program of the Hollywood Bowl's summer jazz series seemed like an off-the-wall shocker when it was first announced. Incredible though he may be within his own genre, how in the world could the Godfather of Soul squeeze his unique assemblage of screams, shouts, splits and sweat into a jazz context? It turned out that bassist Christian McBride, the Philharmonic's Creative Chair for Jazz, had a very specific - if obscure - framework in mind. Nearly four decades ago, in late 1969, Brown went into the studio with a big band led by drummer Louis Bellson to record a set of tunes arranged by the great orchestrator Oliver Nelson for the album "Soul on Top." On Wednesday, Brown performed those songs - along with the reconstructed Nelson charts (the originals were lost) - with an aggregation of Southland jazz all-stars. As with the recording, neither Brown nor jazz suffered from the encounter, primarily because neither did much adapting to the other's style. Brown's rendering of numbers such as "For Once in My Life" (which also featured a drum solo from Bellson) and "It's Magic" were so idiosyncratic that some passages were virtually unrecognizable. And the Nelson arrangements, with their lush, jazz-based harmonies, simply floated along in their own separate musical reality. The only exception was an odd, funk-driven version of "September Song" in which the vocal and the arrangement drifted in and out of stylistic sync.