TALENT STREAM FOLLOWS FLOW OF PETE FOUNTAIN

With celebrated New Orleans club owner and clarinetist Pete Fountain as this year’s principal lure, the third annual Los Angeles Classic Jazz Festival attracted its largest turnout yet over Labor Day weekend.

Approximately 26 bands and 34 guests artists teamed up in innumerable permutations over the festival’s four days and three nights. But it was the shaved-head, spade-bearded Fountain the customers wanted to hear most.

Fountain played to standing-room-only crowds in the Airport Marriott’s grand ballroom and seemed to get better as the weekend progressed.

In an early set he took the trumpet-like approach of a man accustomed to competing with the noises of cash registers and overliquified tourists avid for “The Saints.” Subsequently, as if relaxed by the ambiance and inspired by his sidemen, who variously included veteran tenor man Eddie Miller and the elegant fluegelhornist from Big Sur, Jackie Coon, Fountain played the clarinet about as well as it can be played, with sweet-toned lyricism, virtuoso leaps and runs at speed and a freshet of ideas amazing for a man who has done the same tunes so many times.

At that, the Classic Jazz Festival grows more eclectic each time out and if Dixieland is still undoubtedly the prevailing motif, the single presiding spirit--if there is one--is surely Bix Beiderbecke.

One of the best of the traditionally shaped groups was the Sons of Bix, whose co-leader and cornetist, Tom Pletcher, a Michigan businessman, has made his musical life a homage to Bix, improvising in a fluid, thoughtful and faintly melancholy style that is a far cry from the raucous, curse-the-torpedoes attack of the Dixie past.

Other Bix-flavored cornetists on hand included Dick Randolph of the Rhythm Kings and Dick Miller of the Jazzin’ Babies, both local groups. Miller played “Echoes of Bix,” a tune in the Beiderbecke-Frankie Trumbauer style, written for the group by Rosie McHargue, an indestructible 84-year-old reed man.

Jackie Coon, who spent nine years in a parading Dixie group at Disneyland before he fled screaming to the hills and who also worked briefly with Fountain in New Orleans until a similar boredom set in, was inspired as a child by Louis Armstrong. But his mellow and eloquent style now seems Bix-like in its melodic flow.

Coon’s group, the Seabreeze 8, with arrangements by Dick Cary, who also played alto horn, piano and trumpet, performed some of the weekend’s most beautiful sounds, chief among them a gorgeous rendering of “Chelsea Bridge,” a Duke Ellington song by Billy Strayhorn. (Ellington was another hovering presence over the weekend.)

Ever more ambitious, the festival this year offered three international bands, Grand Dominion from British Columbia, the Dixieland All-Stars of East Berlin in the German Democratic Republic and the Fenix Jazz Band from Buenos Aires. You are tempted to say that tasty corn in a world commodity.

Fenix offered one of the weekend’s most energetic vocalists, the trilingual Susana Delgado. The band finished one set with a thunderous version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with a recitative in favor of international amity by its leader, Ernesto Carrizo, who plays soprano sax in the style of Sidney Bechet.

There was more black representation this year: Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers, the 40-year-old Los Angeles rock ‘n’ roll band, was back for a second year and drew standing ovations.

Veteran vocalist Maxine Sullivan, New York pianist/composer Sir Charles Thompson (“Robbins’ Nest”) and a wild blues singer named Carrie Smith were among the guest artists, and several groups were integrated.

What seems true, however, is that the re-creation of the trad past has been largely a white enthusiasm, and also that many of the country’s most eminent black jazzmen have long since been preempted by Dick and Matty Gibson’s older Labor Day weekend jazz party in Denver.

The Classic Jazz Festival is a dazing array of options, with music simultaneously available in eight locations, a pleasing frustration.

Eclectic isn’t half of it. There was the Chrysanthemum Ragtime Band from San Francisco, a charming and scholarly 11-piece orchestra, featuring two violins and a viola, expertly performing the anticipations of jazz, mostly period arrangements from no later than 1920, including such novelties as “The Entertainer’s Rag” (not Scott Joplin’s) in which “Dixie” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy” are played contrapuntally.

At some other extreme was or were Palm Springs Yacht Club, four merry Los Angeles chaps, three of whom sing close harmony (possibly in the style of the Delta Rhythm Boys), while also attending to guitar, bass and drums, even as Bob Reitmeier accompanies them with cool clarinet and alto sax obbligatos. One is not likely to hear an odder but more engaging version of the Woody Herman instrumental “Four Brothers.”

Banu Gibson, the lively New Orleans singer who style evokes Helen O’Connell more than Bessie Smith, was on hand with her Hot Jazz Orchestra, doing “Squeeze Me” and other pleasures. Chris Norris, with the Golden Eagle Jazz Band, evoked the older blues style with “Young Woman’s Blues.”

The weekend’s durability honors were shared by Will Bill Davison, still blowing hard in his 81st year, and Rosie McHargue, who played fine C-melody sax with the Jazzin’ Babies and sang duets with Ian Whitcomb, a refugee from the rock ‘n’ roll ‘60s.

The crowd itself, colorful, cheerful and energetic, is part of the festival’s attraction. At nearly all performances there was at least a sliver of dance room available and always crowded. The post-55s, jitterbugging with a kind of stately, energy-efficient grace, suggested that classic jazz among its several virtues has youthifying powers.

Chuck Conklin, the festival’s director, said the preregistration exceeded last year’s total registration and that attendance for the four days could reach 20,000.