Free Concerts Highlight Playboy Festival; Trumpeter Clora Bryant Visits Soviet Union

As in the past, the Playboy Jazz Festival--on tap at the Hollywood Bowl, June 17-18--will be preceded by a number of free community events, designed, according to a Playboy spokeswoman, “to bring the festival to the public at large and promote a greater understanding and awareness of all forms of jazz music.”

Kicking off the concerts is a Cinco de Mayo bash--headlining Poncho Sanchez, Wishful Thinking and 1 + One (featuring Patrice Rushen and Ndugu Chancler)--at Monarch Quad, Los Angeles Valley College, Van Nuys, on May 7, 1:30 p.m.

On May 14 at 1:30 p.m., Bill Berry and the L.A. Band, the Rhythm Kings and String of Pearls will swing things in a Salute to Seniors at Plummer Park, 7377 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. More big-band sounds will come from the Locke High School Band, directed by John Davis, when it wails forth at the Watts Labor Action Community Center, 10956 Central Ave., at 10 a.m. on May 26.

Two of the freebies are outdoors in the South Bay area. On Memorial Day, May 29, the division winners of the Western States Jazz Festival will perform at the Fiesta de las Artes on Pier Avenue, Hermosa Beach, 1-4 p.m. And on June 11, 1,000 jazz fans will board the newly constructed 183-foot California Hornblower for the Playboy Jazz Cruise. As the ship cruises the Los Angeles harbor, music from the Capp-Pierce Juggernaut Big Band, Brandon Fields and Gerald Wiggins will be heard. Tickets for this event are not for sale but are being distributed through radio promotions on KKGO-FM, KCRW-FM and KLON-FM.

The community events wrap up with a pair on June 16: Jazz at City Hall, a noontime concert featuring 8-year-old drummer Jacob Armen, and his father, Albert; and Jazz on Film, a selection of film clips drawn from the collection of archivist Mark Cantor, to be shown at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, 8948 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, 8 p.m.

Information: (213) 450-9040.

SOVIET VISIT: Taking advantage of glasnost, jazz trumpeter Clora Bryant fulfilled a longtime wish earlier this month when she performed in the Soviet Union. Bryant--a veteran musician who, as a youth, played with such people as saxman Frank Morgan in bands on Central Avenue in the mid-’1940s--flew to the Soviet Union as a guest of the Soviet cultural agency’s Gosconcert.

Assured of five paid performances, Bryant arrived in Moscow to find that she, in fact, had none. “The guy that had booked me had had a heart attack, and no one had done anything,” she said. “But some cultural agency people worked quickly and set up a series of engagements.”

On Sunday, April 10, she appeared at a jazz festival at the Hotel Arayama, near Moscow, and the following day at the noted Bluebird, a 250-seat jazz club. “They have a great networking system in Moscow, and when word got out that we were there, the club filled up. It was great!” said Bryant, 59, who went to the Soviet Union with her sons, Darrin, 21, a singer, and Kevin, 23, a drummer, and a film crew from UCLA.

At the Bluebird, Bryant played such tunes as Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time” and “Billie’s Bounce,” with a band led by saxophonist Sasha Pischikov. “It was a good band. They know all the bop tunes from listening to the Voice of America,” she said.

The trumpeter--who appears Friday at Nucleus Nuance and celebrates her 60th birthday with a show May 30 at the Biltmore’s Grand Avenue Bar--next traveled to Yaroslavl, 100 miles north of Moscow, for a five-day festival called Jazz on the Volga. “Musicians from all over Russia, were there, and I played every day,” she said. “The hotel was right on the Volga River, which was covered with ice, and people were ice fishing. It was beautiful.”

Playing in the Soviet Union was such a rewarding experience that Bryant is returning in August. “And I get to take my own group.”

Bryant hopes to help other musicians make the same journey. “I wanted to open the door so that people could go easier than I did,” she said. “And with what I know now, I can help others. There are a lot of people waiting to go.”

*** “In a Jazz Tradition” (EmArcy) finds guitarist Eric Gale heading up a combo--with bassist Ron Carter, saxman Houston Person, organist Lonnie Smith and drummer Grady Tate--where “jazz tradition” means “the blues.” Gale--who leans more toward the sparse, telling phrasing of a bluesman such as B. B. King than the fluid-line, hard-swinging quality of strictly-jazz players such as Wes Montgomery--injects blues feeling into everything from “Eric’s Gale,” a medium cooker, to Duke Jordan’s classic “Jordu” and Tadd Dameron’s “If You Could See Me Now.” Person’s resonant, toasty sound provides welcome moments and the rhythm section keeps things percolating.