JAZZ REVIEW : Societies Lock Horns Over Image

The Southern California Hot Jazz Society, the Hot Jazz & Alligator Gumbo Society, the Fresno Dixieland Society. . . . It was easy to discern, from the names of the groups, the general orientation of the American Federation of Jazz Societies, which launched its annual convention Friday at the Pacifica Hotel.

These nonprofit organizations do their best to stir up interest by presenting jazz in their areas. However, if the live events presented Friday and Saturday were any yardstick (no live music was scheduled for Sunday), the societies have a serious image problem.

Friday evening, the admirable clarinetist Abe Most, 69, leading a group that included a fine vibes soloist, Peter Appleyard, and Lou Levy on piano, offered a set of swing standards, representative of an idiom that had its heyday half a century ago.

On Saturday afternoon, it went backward from there. Rosy McHargue, a saxophonist who admitted to 87 years, talked and sang and played his way through a set that included such novelty songs as “When Rosy Magula Does the Hula Macula.” It might as well have been George Burns. An octet billed as the Jazzin’ Babies Jazz Band played this set.

Saturday evening, Charles McPherson, pushing 50, a last-minute addition (he was to have taken part only as a panelist), represented bebop, an idiom that is now rapidly becoming traditional. He played mainly tunes of the 1930s and ‘40s, but the group soared on the strength of its personnel, as well as a delightful McPherson original and a brilliant blues featuring pianist Alan Broadbent and bassist John Clayton. McPherson, his son Charles Jr. on drums, Clayton and pianist Gerald Wiggins were the only black musicians who performed for an elderly, almost all-white audience.

The trouble is that jazz, as Times Arts Editor Charles Champlin said in his keynote speech, must not renounce its past, but by the same token must not deny or ignore its evolution, which the jazz societies tend to do. Four of the federation’s directors and one officer recently resigned to protest the traditionalist bias, pointing out that the societies are supposed to represent all forms of jazz.

Artists like the Marsalis family, Terence Blanchard, Emily Remler, Jane Ira Bloom, Marcus Roberts, Harry Connick Jr. and countless others in their teens, 20s and 30s need desperately to be recognized. We cannot drive Model T Fords in an age of Jaguars and Mercedes.