Jazz : L.A. Classic Jazz Fest: Voyage to a Remarkable Past

The L.A. Classic Jazz Festival, launched seven Labor Days ago by a coalition of local jazz clubs, has become an established success, drawing between 4,000 and 6,000 of the faithful from several states for a happy deluge of traditional music that runs (at as many as eight venues simultaneously) from midday Friday through a concluding monster jam session that kicks off at 4 o’clock Monday afternoon at the Airport Marriott.

The festival is a preservationist mix of look-back Dixieland and ragtime and the straight-ahead sounds of what could roughly be called the Eddie Condon era, in homage to that late and celebrated New York artist.

A later feature has been the big band revivals, Benny Goodman as reconstituted by Abe Most for two years; the Bob Crosby band, with Crosby himself on hand last year; the ghost bands of Harry James (led by Art Depew) and Horace Heidt (led by Horace Heidt Jr.) this year. The James band drew an overflow crowd to a ballroom Saturday night. But it was a limp and disappointing performance, which inexplicably kicked off with a Goodman rather than a James chart. The dancers stayed; the listeners began to drift away.

There were by my count some 23 Dixieland or ragtime-focused bands, including such perennial local crowd pleasers as Banu Gibson and Her New Orleans Hot Jazz Orchestra, Hot Cotton, Hot Frogs, the Golden Eagle, Bob Ringwald’s Great Pacific Jazz Band, Fulton Street and the Garden Avenue Seven.

Making a second appearance was singer Lillian Boutte and her quartet, New Orleans born except for her mate, reedman Thomas L’Etienne, and now operating out of Hamburg, West Germany. Short and sturdy, Boutte is an amusing and appealing up-tempo belter with a fine support group. L’Etienne is thoughtful, inventive and propulsive on all the reeds. Pianist Ed Frank, who has the use of his right hand only, creates extraordinary cascades of sound with it, from the piledriver single notes of Thelonious Monk to the marching chords of Dave Brubeck.

The festival is rich in good singers: Gibson and Boutte, Chris Norris of the Golden Eagle band, Janet Carroll of the Hot Frogs, Polly Podewell in a later mode.

Festival allegiances are divided between the traditional outfits and the ad-hoc groups, the shifting coalitions of more than 40 instrumentalists, many of them also popular repeaters, such as clarinetist Chuck Hedges; cornetists Tommy Saunders and Ed Polcer; drummers Jake Hanna, Gene Estes and Buzzy Drootin, and pianists Johnny Varro, Ray Sherman and Dick Cary.

A notable debut this year was that of tenor sax and clarinetist Ken Peplowski, whose choruses at any tempo had a flowing melodic beauty, and who on a slow ballad recalled the breathy, low-register probings of Coleman Hawkins.

The festival honored the late Wild Bill Davison with several sessions led by his friend and protege Tommy Saunders with a group including Varro and Hedges, who had frequently toured with Davison. They created some of the weekend’s best sounds. At one session they did a version of “Satan Takes a Holiday” (not remembered as a jazz tune) that Saunders said they’d worked up during a slow afternoon in Switzerland.

Despite the enthusiasm and the size of the turnout, the feeling among the musicians is that jazz remains in the endangered class. Jazz cruises and jazz parties have taken up some of the slack from the decline of jazz clubs. But it is true that mainstream jazzmen especially are more honored at sea and abroad than at hometown gigs.

Chuck Hedges, a world-class clarinetist, reported that he is re-starting his instrument repair business as a hedge against the commercial vagaries of the jazz world.

It seemed clear that while there were a fair number of younger musicians in view, the great majority of the attendees will not see 55 again and, for all their genuine pleasure in reliving some memories, they are actuarially not good news for the jazz future. While there are more young jazz fans on hand each year (and a more integrated crowd), the voyage is essentially to a remarkable past.

It is deeply disturbing to anyone who loves the form because the failure to engender viable new audiences threatens the loss of a national treasury as well as a heritage. The quality of the musicianship reflected at the festival--the amazing creation of original musical art before your very ears --is unique, thrilling and often very beautiful indeed.

If the festival is proof that not all traditional jazz is created equal--the banality of the most rote of the ricky-tick takes some forgiveness, even by its aficionados--the festival is also a reminder of the glory of the spontaneous creativity that is at the heart of all jazz, past, present and future.