JAZZ / DIRK SUTRO : UCSD Jazz Director to Join Proteges in Performance

Jimmy Cheatham, the San Diego trombonist who leads the Sweet Baby Blues Band with wife, Jeannie, a vocalist and pianist, will make a rare appearance before a San Diego audience next Wednesday, putting the UC San Diego Jazz Ensemble through its paces in a show at Mandeville Auditorium on campus. Cheatham is a professor of music at UCSD, directing the jazz program.

Can San Diegans expect to hear him play?

“They’ll hear me play the orchestra,” joked Cheatham, who wants the jazz program at UCSD to be “strongly based in the black musical experience, the Kansas City style, from Bennie Moten to Count Basie and Fletcher Henderson, from Ellington to Thad Jones.”

The performance will showcase Cheatham’s proteges in a variety of formats, from a 25- to 30-piece big band that includes an Afro-Cuban percussion section, to solos and duos. “Lucumi Macumba Voodoo,” something of a production number, even includes singers and calypso dancers.

During the show, Cheatham will hand out awards to the students, including one from the National Assn. of Jazz Educators that the ensemble received at last January’s NAJE convention in San Diego, along with several school awards for best individual and group performances during the year.

As for the Sweet Baby Blues Band, its fourth and newest album, “Back to the Neighborhood,” has generated heavy demand. For the uninitiated, the band’s all-star lineup includes trumpeters Snooky Young and Clora Bryant; reed men Dinky Morris, Jimmie Noone, Curtis Peagley and sometimes Herman Riley, plus Red Callender on bass and John (Ironman) Harris on drums. They will be gone most of the summer touring, with stops later this month at Joe Siegel’s Jazz Showcase in Chicago and the Blue Note in New York City, where they set house attendance records last September.

San Diegans hungry for a dose of Baby Blues should consider a trip to Hollywood this Friday or Saturday night, where the band plays the Vine Street Bar & Grill. Tickets for the UCSD show are $5, or $3 for senior citizens and students.

Jazz clarinet players haven’t had an easy go of it in the latter half of this century. When big bands gave way to be-bop in the ‘40s, the clarinet didn’t make the transition as readily as trumpets and saxes.

Nonetheless, clarinetist Buddy DeFranco, who opened a two-week run at Elario’s with vibraphonist Terry Gibbs on Wednesday night, stood by his instrument. Unlike Benny Goodman, DeFranco was one of the few clarinet players to expand his repertoire into the realm of bop, a challenge on an instrument that requires precise technique.

After spending the ‘40s in several of the major big bands, he joined Count Basie for two years, beginning in 1950, then led his own small groups through the ‘50s. He spent eight years with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, then formed a group with Gibbs in 1979.

Gibbs, a veteran of the big bands of Woody Herman, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, played in smaller groups with Sam Jones, Louis Hayes and Kenny Burrell, among others. His aggressive, precise mallet attack provides both rhythmic and melodic counterpoint to DeFranco’s horn. It’s an unusual and provocative pairing.

You must have heard San Diego jazz pianist Randy Porter somewhere, in a duo at the Horton Grand Hotel, or backing local players such as Steve Feierabend, or in Palm Desert recently, behind jazz singer Diane Schuur. He’ll also be on stage with her in August at Humphrey’s.

At 26, Porter is shaping a promising career. For a young musician, he shows surprising taste and restraint, his solos are melodic and never cluttered, his backup work is sparse, with just enough chords and embellishments to push a soloist.

Porter was exposed to both jazz and classical music at an early age by his older brother, also a musician. In 10th grade at Hoover High School in San Diego, he hesitantly volunteered to solo during a school big band practice session. Afterward, the instructor came over and laid a penny on the piano, a rarely given sign of approval.

Though Porter’s tendency is toward the straight-ahead side of jazz, he has dabbled in electronics and fusion. He was a member of Hollis Gentry’s Neon until about a year ago, and wrote two of the songs on the band’s new album: “Jacoby Creek” and “Song for Symon.”

Porter writes often. He recently recorded 11 originals with Hank Dobbs on bass and Billy Mintz on drums. Sometime soon, he may make cassettes of the session available. You can hear him June 12 at Croce’s downtown with an acoustic quartet, and Fridays through June with singer Ellen Johnson at the Bucharest restaurant in La Jolla.

RIFFS: Hiroshima, whose music is a slick fusion of traditional Japanese music and instruments with jazz and modern electronics, appears June 7 and 8 at Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay. The group just finished performing the autobiographical musical “Sansei” at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Its new album is titled “East.”. . . . San Diego jazz guitarist Peter Sprague plays June 2 with a quintet at the Book Works/Pannikin at Flower Hill Mall in Del Mar and June 4 with JazzBrasil, including singer Kevyn Lettau, at the Full Moon Cafe, 485 1st St., Encinitas. . . . Those who heard Joe Henderson and George Cables during their recent two-week gig at Elario’s seemed to agree that the real chemistry was not between the two headliners, but between pianist Cables and bassist Marshall Hawkins. . . . San Diego flutist Lori Bell was the guest on KIFM’s mainstream jazz show Sunday night, and the music selected by her and host Steve Huntington included a quirky version of Kermit the Frog’s song about being green, sung by pianist Dave Mackay, Bell’s frequent musical partner.