Horns of Plenty : Dixieland Jazz Fest Returns This Weekend

You can’t help but wax patriotic when you hear Bart Hazlett and the Dixie Hasslers rip through their jazz rendition of “Dixie.” As a trumpet blasts the melody and snare drum rolls explode, you imagine yourself staring out over a smoky Civil War battlefield shortly after Daniel Decatur Emmett penned his Southern anthem in 1859.

Perhaps the nostalgic emotions such music triggers account for the all-time peak popularity of the traditional brand of jazz known as Dixieland more than 100 years after some of its essential songs were written. Since 1974, when the now-giant Sacramento Dixieland Jubilee, king of the Dixieland festivals, began, hundreds of similar but smaller festivals have sprouted across the country, and bands have cropped up around the world.

During the four-day Thanksgiving weekend (Nov. 28 to Dec. 1), about 15,000 jazz buffs are expected to visit the 12th Annual San Diego Thanksgiving Dixieland Jazz Festival at the Town & Country Hotel in Mission Valley.

San Diego trombonist Hazlett, 70, and his Hasslers are only one of 28 bands scheduled to appear. The groups will blast a steady supply of music from 10 stages.

Besides the Hasslers, three other San Diego bands will be on hand: the Chicago Six, High Society and the San Diego Historical Dixieland Banjo Society. Eleven groups are playing the San Diego festival for the first time.

Along with the music, a special highlight will come Saturday night at 7, when 79-year-old San Diego trumpeter John Best is honored as “Gentleman of Jazz” for 1991, an award bestowed for lifetime achievement in the field. Trumpeter John Norris, retired leader of the New Orleans Jazz Band of Hawaii, was the first recipient when the citation was inaugurated last year.

After the presentation, Best will play a set with a band of old musical mates. He will also sit in with other groups during the festival.

Best has been in jazz for close to 60 years. During the 1930s, he launched his career with big bands fronted by Charlie Barnet, Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller. Some of Best’s playing from those years can be heard on reissues of early big band recordings.

During the 1940s, Best played with Benny Goodman’s band and became known as a top West Coast studio and radio big band musician.

Louis Armstrong was one of his early heroes.

“I got to know him pretty well,” he said. “I was with Glenn Miller in New York when I met him. I liked his sound, the notes he played.”

In a ballroom setting, Armstrong proved just how powerful he was.

“In those days, of course, we didn’t play with microphones,” Best recalled. “Ballrooms sometimes held 5,000 people, and they could make a lot of noise. If you didn’t play loud, you might as well not come along!”

Best first spent time in San Diego County in 1950, when he bought an avocado ranch in Pauma Valley. He was a hands-on grower until 10 years ago, when he fell off a ladder while picking avocados and broke his back. He sold the ranch because he was no longer up to the hard labor. Today, confined to a wheelchair, he lives in La Jolla with his wife, Mary Lou, and plays less than he used to.

Best was a member of Hazlett’s Hasslers during the the early 1960s, when the band regularly played the Honeybucket on Rosecrans, where the Body Shop nude dancing club is now. One of Best’s best numbers with Hazlett was “What’s New,” a version of which survives on an early-1960s Hasslers album titled “The Honeybucket Years” (it has been reissued by Hazlett on cassette, and you can buy a copy this weekend). Best’s most recent recordings were made in the early 1980s, with Ray Conniff’s band.

Hazlett’s Hasslers will be familiar to many San Diegans--the group has been a regular fixture at the Del Mar Fair since 1952.

If it seems odd that such a longstanding local Dixieland band hasn’t played the festival before, there’s a reason.

Hazlett and his band were busy and couldn’t play the first two years of the festival, then they didn’t get asked again until this year, after Hazlett became a good friend of bassist Al Adams, a member of the festival’s board. The two played dates in each other’s bands, and Adams invited Hazlett and the Hasslers to play the festival.

Like Hazlett’s group, most of the bands booked for the show have been together for several years. These groups are extremely tight and have repertoires well into the hundreds of songs, which means they can play several sets without repeating themselves.

Night Blooming Jazzmen is the only group that has played every San Diego Dixieland festival. As the traditional jazz festival scene has expanded, the band has found its services much in demand.

“Besides the 20 festivals we’re playing, we turned down another dozen,” said the band’s leader and cornetist, Chet Jaeger, who lives in Claremont in Los Angeles County. “And we’re almost completely booked for 1992.”

Dixieland is the oldest form of American jazz. Legend has it that it began after the Civil War, when Army bands sold their instruments to Southern blacks, who began to invent a new music. Fans love the music for its steady beat, bright, recognizable melodies, and improvisations that stay close to each tune’s signature beat and melody.

For Jaeger, 67, Dixieland is the only jazz that counts.

“I went to hear Dizzy (Gillespie) at Disneyland a few years back, and it sounded like four guys doing there own thing, like they didn’t even know the others were up there,” Hazlett said. “As technicians they were superb, but as a group, I just didn’t understand it. I know what we’re doing. We all work around established chord patterns, and we work together to do things that will back each other up. It’s really a lot of fun when the whole band is thinking as one mind. It’s like a hot basketball team that can do no wrong.”

Like many of the bands to be featured this week, Night Blooming Jazzmen has recorded several self-produced albums, selling them at festivals. Some of the band’s eight albums have sold as many as 5,000 copies. Their latest is a collection of 16 Gospel hymns, arranged for this seven-piece jazz ensemble.

“Every festival we go to, on Sunday morning we have a ‘hymn sing,’ ” Jaeger said. “I believe we’re the only band that does this. We hand out song books with words. A year or so ago up in Puget Sound, outdoors on Sunday morning, we had 3,500 singing along.” In San Diego, the sing-along will be from 8:30 to 10.

Swing jazz, be-bop, cool jazz, fusion--other forms of jazz-have all supplanted Dixieland over the years. Yet this original, classic brand of jazz remains popular.

“All I can think of is, it’s what you would call a happy music,” Best said. “It doesn’t get involved in love affairs or discontent.”

A pass for all four days of the San Diego Thanksgiving Dixieland Jazz Festival is $55, with a three-day pass going for $45. Individual day passes are $20 Friday and Saturday, $15 Thursday and Sunday. Music lasts from 7 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. Thursday; noon to 1:30 a.m. Friday; 10 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. Saturday; and 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. For more information, call 297-5277.