S.D. Dixieland Fest Has Come Into Its Own : Music: Organizers expect 15,000 people to attend the four-day event, which draws bands from around the country.

It’s only 10 years old, but the San Diego Dixieland Jazz Festival has come of age.

Whereas its organizers once scoured the country for great new bands, they now sift through more than 100 tapes sent from musicians all over the world.

Through Sunday, 25 bands invited to this year’s festival will present a veritable orgy of the seminal jazz at the Town & Country Hotel in Mission Valley. Continuous music will be heard in 10 rooms, ranging from intimate to the 1,200-capacity Presidio Room.

Festival organizers expect 15,000 people for the four-day event, which opened Thursday night.

The uninitiated may well ask how Dixieland differs from any other brand of jazz.

“I’ve run into a lot of people who find it difficult to explain,” said Alan Adams, president of the America’s Finest City Dixieland Jazz Society, the event’s sponsor. Adams also plays tuba in the Mississippi Six, one of the featured bands. “To my way of thinking, it’s a syncopated style of playing, and the improvisation is melodic.”

“The kind of music that will be heard this weekend is the stuff that was played before the advent of be-bop in the ‘50s,” added Len Levine, a jazz society member and editor of the Jazz Rambler, its newsletter.

Most of the music relates to the original New Orleans style developed by musicians such as King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, later variations in Chicago, New York and other cities, plus ragtime and other traditional styles.

“Dixieland has become sort of an umbrella term that differentiates these bands from modern bands,” Levine said.

While more recent forms of jazz feature abstract solos based on various musical theories, Dixieland is anchored by a consistent, danceable beat and improvisations that echo a song’s melody, rather than the underlying chord structure. These tangible qualities are what make the music irresistible to fans both young and old.

Included in this year’s lineup are four bands that have never appeared here: the Paramount Jazz Band from Boston; the Magnolia Jazz Band from Oslo, Norway; the Frisco Syncopators from New Orleans and the Golden Gate Rhythm Machine from the San Francisco Bay Area.

“We didn’t get serious about our music until 1987, when we were invited to the Sacramento festival,” said Paramount drummer and leader Ray Smith. The West Coast is considered the Dixieland capital of the country, and Sacramento hosts the king of the Dixie festivals each Memorial Day weekend.

“We do the hard-core vintage jazz of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Clarence Williams and King Oliver,” Smith said. “We’re also noted for playing obscure ballads, tunes of the ‘20s few other bands play.” These include the Dixie Serenaders’ “Cho-King” and some lesser-known Duke Ellington numbers.

Smith’s band includes seven pieces: a front line of a cornet, a clarinet and various saxophones, driven by a rhythm section of piano, tuba, banjo and drums.

“Without trombone, we’re not really Dixie, although we play a lot of polyphonics,” Smith said, referring to the technique of juxtaposing two or more independent melody lines.

Among the festival’s featured bands are several from San Diego, including the eight-piece South Market Street Jazz Band, anchored by the husband-wife team of Bill and Carol Dendle on trombone and banjo.

Although Dixieland jazz in San Diego seems like an underground movement because there are no clubs dedicated to the music, the members of South Market Street make their livings playing Dixie at conventions and private parties.

The Dendles prove that a whole generation of new Dixie and traditional jazz players are carrying the melodic torch.

“My father exposed me to the music,” Carol Dendle said. “I liked it because it’s so happy. When Bill was in high school, he heard ‘Midnight in Moscow,’ Kenny Ball’s Top 40 song in England 25 years ago. Bill got the record and fell in love with it. The music is very infectious. We play a lot of places with little kids, and they love it. They jump up and down.”

The festival was launched in 1980 by management at the Town & Country.

After the first two years, however, the burden of organization grew too unwieldy for the hotel, and the jazz society took over as the sponsor, with $10,000 in seed money from Great American First Savings.

The bank dropped its sponsorship two years ago, and the society has since attracted other backers to underwrite the cost of setting up each room, at $1,000 or more apiece.

Society members see the festival and the music as far more than entertainment. To them, preserving this original form of jazz has become a mission they pursue with religious zeal.

“We try to support the schools not to lose sight of melodic improvisation, which, in the educational system, hasn’t been taught,” Adams said.

Badges good for all festival events are $45; day passes are also available. Festival hours are noon to 1:30 a.m. today, 10 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. tomorrow and 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.