WEEKEND REVIEWS : Pop & Jazz : Weekend Packed With Pizazz

In hard times for mainstream jazz, the faithful cluster at jazz weekends--four or five sessions and 18-plus hours of music, for a hefty price. The latest, organized by Mel Fond, stomped off on the weekend at the Airport Hilton, with cornetist Ruby Braff, an infrequent visitor to the West Coast, as its principal but by no means sole attraction.

At that, one of the party’s great excitements was a Saturday night set featuring Braff and his fellow cornetist and pal, Warren Vache Jr., in a series of elegant, driving exchanges that produced a deserved standing ovation.

Braff’s style, wholly his own, is a blinding mix of furious runs and arpeggios, growlings amid the horn’s lowest tones and high-low register leaps that are the sonic equivalent of bungee-jumping and equally exciting. Vache constructs solos at any tempo that are wonderfully coherent and lyrical--song begat of song in the way of fine jazzmen always.

The modest crowd, set in a cavernous ballroom, was more appreciative than demonstrative and didn’t produce the kind of heat in which jazz cooks best (some of the players kidded from the stand about the prevailing cool). But the musicians produced some memorable heat, including a wonderful exchange between the veteran Milt Hinton on bowed bass and young Dan Barrett on trombone.

It was a grand weekend for the clarinet: a haunting version of “Mood Indigo” by Kenny Davern, dedicated to Mrs. Barney Bigard, whose late husband wrote it and sold it to Ellington for $50; and a fine playing of “Singing the Blues” by Bobby Gordon, whose work in the low register makes the horn a cello.

Guitarist Marty Grosz led another Saturday night set, with Gordon, Hinton and Dick Meldonian on tenor, that produced some tasty, pianoless chamber jazz and much charm, including the Grosz vocal on Fred Astaire’s song “I’m Building Up to an Awful Letdown.”

The party’s senior participant, 87-year-old Doc Cheatham, played age-defying trumpet and sang. The other standouts included pianists Ralph Sutton and Johnny Varro (who did a rich, four-hands mini-set), guitarists Howard Alden and Mary Osborne, Dick Hafer on tenor and Bob Havens on trombone, Dave Stone and Monty Budwig on bass, Abe Most on reeds, Don Rader on fluegelhorn, Dave McKenna and Nat Pierce on piano, a trio of timekeepers, Jake Hanna, Frankie Capp and the veteran Bostonian Buzzy Drootin, and the former Woody Herman vocalist, Polly Podewell.

The customers flew in from as far as Indiana and Kansas. Mainstream is where you can find it.