LOS ANGELES FESTIVAL : LIBERTY GROUP SHINES : CLASSIC MOMENTS MISSING IN EVENING OF CLASSIC JAZZ

It was a most curious way to start a festival. Like Alice’s journey through the rabbit holes, the Los Angeles Festival’s Evening of Classic Jazz Friday night at the Embassy Theater was a trip into a world where things were not always as they seemed.

The inclusion, for example of two entertainment-oriented groups and one movie jazz band as the opening entries in a festival presumably designed to showcase creativity in all its many manifestations was a decision quixotic enough to have made the Queen of Hearts proud. Add the fact that only one of the ensembles--cornetist Dick Cathcart and Pete Kelly’s Big 7 (from the movie “Pete Kelly’s Blues”)--is from the Los Angeles area, and the program begins to look very brillig, indeed.

The presence of the evening’s first group--the Paco Gatsby band from Guatemala--had far less to do with classic jazz than it did with classic showbiz topspin. Gatsby’s music, with the exception of leader Bob Porter’s crisp cornet solos, was just beyond the amateur level.

Cathcart’s septet had far more to offer, including the luminous jazz names of Eddie Miller, Nick Fatool and George Van Eps. But the ensemble work, despite its finely honed edges, lacked spunk.

The Joe Liggins Honeydrippers set unexpectedly became a tribute to the leader, who passed away last month. Never much more than a hot ‘40s jump band, the current incarnation (reorganized in 1975) spent most of its program playing weary revivals of bourbon blues numbers of the period.

The evening’s high point--and, ironically its only real “classic” moment--was provided by the brilliantly authentic music of Michael White’s Original Liberty Jazz Band. Staffed with musicians all under the age of 35, the group nonetheless ripped through a program of New Orleans jazz that recalled everyone from King Oliver and Sam Morgan to Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.

Yet, far from being a note-by-note revivalist band, the Liberty group uncovered a surprising amount of new and vital ideas in a style that is too often treated as an anachronistic museum piece.