P.S. Festival: Don’t Call It Dixieland

Though this weekend’s Palm Springs Jazz 1990-91 at the Wyndham Palm Springs Hotel (888 E. Tahquitz Way) boasts such bands as Jake Porter and the Dixie Roadrunners, the Dixieland Express and the Jazzin’ Babies, don’t let producer John McNally hear you call his show a Dixieland event.

“I hate that word,” says the man who, with partners Libby Huebner and Laurie Whitlock, will be running the Saturday-through-Monday festival for the third year in a row.

“I’d rather call it classic jazz , which means we’re not restricted to music simply from the ‘20s and ‘30s.”

McNally, whom many know from his radio programs on KCRW-FM (89.9)--”Castaway’s Choice,” which ran from 1984 until last April, and “The More Traditional Sounds of Jazz” from 1977-85--acknowledges that many of the close-to-20 bands appearing on four stages at the event are offering “early” jazz.

“But they can stretch their boundaries,” he says, “as when the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band does their roaring version of Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘A Night in Tunisia.’ ”

The 47-year-old native of Kent, England, adds that on the schedule are such non-traditional outfits as Tom Kubis’ Orange County-based big band (featuring trumpeter-singer Jack Sheldon), pianist Yve Evans and Finnish artists Antti Sarpila and Matti Oiling. Among the unusual trad artists is Spencer Davis, the British rock/pop musician who has long embraced “early jazz” as well.

McNally--who with his partners has formed Classic Jazz Management, a California nonprofit corporation--says that his festival started off as a trad--or, if you will, Dixieland--event because he had been a fan of that style of music since the 1960s trad revival in Britain and it has a solid following in the United States.

“Economics dictate you start somewhere and build and we decided earlier forms of jazz would be a good base, since the trad crowd spends its year traveling from festival to festival,” McNally says.

Pre-festival ticket sales are running well ahead of last year’s, which attracted 2,500 fans, McNally says. He has had ducat requests from 22 states and nine countries, including Germany and Australia.

McNally says this is a critical year for his event. “As with any event, the third year is really important. If we go up, we’re viable, and it looks like that’s what’s happening,” he says, adding that he’s hoping for 3,000 this year. “We’re now getting people who say, ‘Oh, you’re having that festival again? Well, we’ll want to come this year.’ The repetition, as with advertising, reinforces the idea in the public’s mind.”

Still, McNally doesn’t foresee breaking even this year--he and his partners lost about $10,000 in 1988 and again in 1989--but he is optimistic he will with future festivals.

“It’s a normal pattern with these festivals that it takes three to five years to establish themselves. We believe that when it’s been going for a while, it will, like the L.A. Classic Jazz Festival, become self-sustaining. And we’re losing a little less money each year.”

The festival lineup also sports Dutch singer Greetje Kauffeld, Chris Kelly’s Black and White New Orleans Jazz Band with Thais Clark, the Palm Springs Yacht Club and the Palm Leaf Ragtime Orchestra and concludes with a gala New Year’s Eve dinner and dance party.

Information: (619) 322-6000, (213) 799-6054.

Party at Home: You can have a great bash New Year’s Eve without leaving your front room. Just tune in the American Jazz Radio Festival’s New Year’s Eve celebration Monday from 7 p.m.-1:30 a.m. on KPCC-FM (89.3).

The show begins with a performance by Nina Simone direct from New York’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, then shifts to Tipitina’s in New Orleans, where bluesmen Snooks Eaglin, Johnny Adams and Earl King wail from 9:30-11:30 p.m. The party ends, and the New Year begins, with a trip to our very own Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood, where trumpet maestro Freddie Hubbard’s quintet, augmented by tenorman Ernie Watts, holds forth from 11:30 p.m-1:30 a.m.