From: "Doug Bright" <75366.2463@compuserve.com> To: Subject: Article: August, 1982 Date: Saturday, April 08, 2006 6:16 PM AUGUST, 1982 SOME LIKE IT COOL: A REPORT FROM BELLEVUE JAZZ By Doug Bright The jazz festival appears to be an American tradition that's here to stay. To my knowledge, it all started back in the Fifties with the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island and developed into a full Eastern summer circuit of such events. As a precocious pre-adolescent, I remember eagerly awaiting CBS Radio's nightly coverage of these super-shows, making the supreme effort to stay awake late enough to catch the excitement of an event whose cool-jazz and bop were a little beyond me. I don't remember hearing any swing on these broadcasts of the late Fifties, and Dixieland would have been unthinkable. Although a notorious riot in 1960 resulted in the termination of the annual Newport festival, the concept has not only remained with us but come back stronger and more geographically widespread than ever. In 1970 there wasn't a jazz festival to be found anywhere in the Northwest, at least not to my knowledge. As prime evidence of the changing times, the summer of '82 is stacking up as the most eventful jazz festival season yet. On July 17th and 18th, the fifth annual Bellevue Jazz Festival occurred on the Bellevue Community College campus. Each day thirteen bands performed on three simultaneous stages from noon until 9 PM, and in true old-style Newport fashion, the campus FM station, KBCS, provided live coverage both days. The Saturday afternoon radio coverage commenced with the Festival Youth Band, a group of especially promising local high school students organized and directed by Roy Cummings from the music department of the University of Washington. Though an occasional awkward note could be heard on a few of the solos, these young musicians demonstrated self-confidence, tonal maturity, and a conceptual understanding of jazz far beyond their years. The sound that Cummings creates for his group is what I would call typical academic stage-band jazz. By intention, this is not a re-creation of the melodic swing of the late Thirties and early Forties, but a perpetuation of the swaggering, brassy style that began with Count Basie and Ray Anthony in the late Forties and kept on going from there. The closest thing to early swing on the Saturday performance was a fast and highly arranged blues progression called "Double Exposure" originating with the Basie band. In contrast to KRAB's rather selective approach to all the simultaneous diversity of the Folklife festivals, the watchword at KBCS was equality. In concrete terms, this meant that broadcast time was distributed at more-or-less regular intervals among the three performance stages. Consequently, the radio audience was whisked away from the Youth Band after a few tunes to catch the cool jazz of the Joanie Metcalf Quintet. Highlighting the Metcalf set was an in-house composition with a typically cosmic title, "Windows To The Universe": a slow and gently swinging piece with rich chords and lyrical solos. The festival was virtually dominated by modern styles ranging from early bop and cool jazz to light rock fusion. Though these more contemporary aspects of jazz are somewhat outside my area of interest and expertise, I can safely say that the performance quality was consistently good. The solos were almost always interestingly inventive without being excessive, and the arrangements were executed with spirit and precision. In short, the players all seemed to know what they were doing. Despite the modernistic bias, there were a few scattered manifestations of the earlier styles during the Saturday show. Janis Lakers and her group, whom I reviewed very enthusiastically last December, appeared early in the afternoon. Though the broadcast coverage of her set was far from complete, it supplied evidence that she's gravitating away from swing in favor of early-period bop. Consequently, her token swing effort on "No Regrets" lost much of its potential power and warmth to more experimental phrasing. It's the very same thing that happened to Ella Fitzgerald in the Fifties. Adding variety to the Saturday afternoon line-up was a unique ensemble called Trombonosaurus which consisted of four trombones and a rhythm section. You couldn't call them hard-core traditionalists, but they did manage to pull off a fine swing tune with tight four-part trombone harmony and intricate phrase-trading, not to mention the high quality of the piano and acoustic bass solos. A little later we heard from a quintet of experienced jazzmen led by saxophonist Don Lanphere. Selections included a lyrical, straightforward saxophone solo rendition of--would I lie to you?--"The Lord's Prayer" with sensitive piano accompaniment, and it worked just fine! This was followed by an uptempo "Body and Soul" with high-flying piano work and a typically exciting bass solo from Chuck Deardorf, whom I consider the best acoustic bassist in the whole Seattle jazz community. Sunday was designated, at least to a degree, as traditional jazz day, and the KBCS coverage opened with the reappearance of the Festival Youth Band. The young musicians swung quite naturally, showing none of the mechanical phrasing that one might expect of students. An arrangement of "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" contained some reed-section harmony that got a little closer to the old-style big bands, but the modern stage-band concept still dominated. By now most of the bugs had been worked out of the hook-up between studio and performance stages, and the result was very good monaural sound. To my impatient delight, the radio coverage then switched to the Uptown Lowdown Jazz Band. We were treated to a grand total of two numbers: a Joe Darensbourg tune called "Louisian-i-a" and the old New Orleans classic "Panama Rag". Over the air, for some unfortunate reason, the horns and clarinet alike sounded rather thin. The solos were reasonably good, but when everyone chimed in together the effect was electrifying. The members of this band seem to draw a peculiar inspiration from each other in this setting, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The result is that wonderful organized anarchy of melody and countermelody that has always defined great New Orleans jazz. Just then we were yanked away to join yet another modernist student group called Opus. They were quite good at their craft, but that was no consolation at all considering the fact that I was missing not only the rest of the Uptown Lowdown set, but also Great Excelsior and Vonne Griffin, who never got on the air at all. A little after one o'clock the coverage mercifully shifted to Barney McClure and Ernestine Anderson for the most extensive transmission yet of a single performance. The trio opened the set with an uptempo number featuring McClure's sophisticated piano style; then out came Ernestine to deliver one of the most notable performances of the entire weekend. With her warm, earthy, and energetic delivery, she was as much at home with an introspective ballad as with a hard-hitting, no-nonsense blues. About an hour and a half later we were treated to yet another example of the single-instrument band concept, but this time the focus was on the tenor sax rather than the trombone. The group was called Tenor Dynasty and featured some very satisfying four-part swing harmony backed up by a solid rhythm section. As if this weren't enough, the band was eventually joined by one of Seattle's very finest vocal discoveries, Jan Stentz. Her style is reminiscent of the young Ella Fitzgerald, and her voice, though mature and professional, hasn't lost any of its natural warmth to experimentalism or oversophistication. All in all, it was an interesting festival that provided me with the best chance yet for an overview of the Seattle area jazz scene in a short period of time. The festival's overwhelming numerical bias toward the contemporary styles indicates that while Dixieland and swing may be alive and well, the trend among musicians is in the other direction. This fact should have made the folks at KBCS all the more willing to give the traditional acts maximum possible coverage during the limited time they occupied. It could be argued that the station's rotary approach, though it sacrifices depth, provides a sort of sightseeing tour that makes the listener at least superficially knowledgeable about the majority of local jazz performers. The unfortunate thing is that in their attempt to achieve an equality of performers, they achieved a tremendous inequality of styles. ----------------------------------------