By the Way Nostalgic Jazz Bookends November 2006

by Daniel G. Shafer

One of the biggest attractions Monterey has always held for me is the annual MJF (Monterey Jazz Festival). My wife and I have been coming to the Peninsula on and off since 1978, and haven’t missed a festival since we moved here permanently six years ago. At a time when jazz is not drawing the huge crowds and media attention it once enjoyed, MJF remains a world-class festival that will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. It is in fact the longest continuous-running annual jazz festival in the world.

This year’s festival, held as usual on the third weekend in September, was a seminal event, not only for me but for jazz aficionados everywhere. I can’t remember enjoying an MJF experience more in all the years I’ve been going to it and following it.

The first indication this was going to be a memorable occasion came on Friday night when the Yellowjackets put on a marvelous show on the Jimmy Lyons Stage in the Main Arena, marking their 25th anniversary as a “band without a leader.”

During that quarter century, the ’Jackets have undergone only four personnel changes, a remarkable record in any industry but a near miracle in the ego-driven world of music.

Russell Ferrante on keyboards, Jimmy Haslip on bass, Bob Mintzer on sax and Marcus Baylor on drums entertained the sell-out crowd with a broad range of old and new hits, many of them written by Ferrante. During the course of their celebratory evening, they were joined by trumpet legend Ray Hargrove, guitarist Robben Ford (who actually instigated the band’s beginning), and scat vocal king Kurt Elling.

I remembered fondly the many hours I spent listening to the Yellowjackets in the mid-1980s as my 20-plus-year-old interest in jazz was re-ignited by the emergence of a new style of music dubbed “fusion jazz” of which the Yellowjackets were pioneers. The blended styles of New Orleans based jazz with Oriental and classical European sounds were engaging and enchanting during those many hours of buzzing up and down Silicon Valley’s Highway 101.

It was great to see and hear the band again, even though only half of them were part of the original group I’d listened to with such lightness of being.

But the crown jewel of MJF/49 for me — and for thousands of others — came on Sunday evening when two legends of the genre took the stage. Dave Brubeck, now 85 and still going strong, wrote this year’s special commission piece for the festival, “Cannery Row Suite.”

As a rule, I haven’t been enamored of the commissioned pieces for MJF but this was a rousing and brilliant exception. Brubeck, who gets much of the credit for my nearly life-long interest in jazz (I actually wore out not one but two copies of the vinyl LP version of his “Take Five” album), started the evening with his current quartet: Bobby Millitello (sax & flute), Michael Moore (bass) and Randy Jones(drums). They played a number of jazz standards with terrific verve and panache.

The commissioned piece, “Cannery Row Suite,” was a jazz opera featuring musical character sketches of people made famous by John Steinbeck in his Cannery Row writings. Brubeck explained, in a droll and witty introduction to the piece, that he had attempted to capture all the variety of sights and sounds that must have permeated the atmosphere of the original Cannery Row when Steinbeck was writing about the place in the 1940s. He was joined onstage by his son Chris’ trio “Triple Play” and a group of singers from University of the Pacific as well as famed operatic scat vocalists Elling and Roberta Gambarini.

In a 30-minute multimedia extravaganza, Brubeck and his supporting cast entertained the crowd with a number of difficult and stimulating pieces, including a shanty tune that will surely become Monterey’s city anthem in due course.

It will be a long time before the last echoes of the sounds of MJF/49 fade from memory. Not only was this one of the finest lineups in the history of the festival, it was, for me, a great personal reverie. Two bookends of my joy for jazz — its inauguration in the early 1960s as I lost myself in the creative timings and intricate phrasings of Brubeck and his original quartet, and the shift into a love for fusion jazz in the mid-1980s thanks to the Yellowjackets — in the same venue two blocks from my house in my beautiful new home town of Monterey.

It just doesn’t get any better than that!

Dan Shafer
Associate Editor
dan@65mag.com