Jazz Review : New Sounds Come From Traditional Sacramento Fest

Each Memorial Day weekend, the sounds of the Sacramento Traditional Jazz Jubilee suffuse the city like the aromas of grapes at pressing time in Napa or chocolate in Hershey, Pa.

A heavy beat echoes through the vast Downtown Plaza shopping center; anthems from a dozen venues compete in the touristy Old Town Riverside area.

In a long hotel lobby, the Porcupine Ragtime Ensemble with a front line of flute, piccolo and violin renders “The Telephone” with the same gentle, strict politeness with which it was played in 1899.

For this year’s 21st running of the festival, there are more than 120 bands on hand, 10 from abroad, including the expert Fat Sam’s from Scotland with its homages to Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and Allotria from Munich, with an all-stops attack suggesting Las Vegas more than Bavaria.

For the first time, a Mexican group, Los Caribe from Guaymas, appeared and wowed the customers with jazz to a Latin beat.

The trad bands, from the Agony Hall Stompers to the Nuclear Whales and the Wildcats, predominate as always and many of them have fiercely devoted followers. The Hot Frogs filled a 900-seat hotel ballroom to capacity before they blew a note and some 300 more fans waited in a line that stretched down a corridor and half a block into the blazing Sacramento morning sun, waiting for seats to open.

But there are also more than two-dozen individual virtuoso jazzmen here joining in ad-hoc groups like the Los Angeles, Midwest and New York All-Stars, and appearing as soloists and in duos to showcase their improvisational skills.

On Friday afternoon, a group led by the brilliant young guitarist Howard Alden and featuring Johnny Varro on piano, Ken Peplowski on reeds, Dan Barrett on trombone, Randy Sandke on trumpet and the Woody Herman alumnus Jake Hanna on drums, did a super-fast version of Herman’s “Apple Honey” that was a stunning showpiece of chamber jazz enriched by glorious invention.

But invention is a function of player, not period, and one of the best of the trad groups, Boston’s Paramount Jazz Band, has in reedmen Steve Wright and Gary Rodberg and cornetist Jeff Hughes musicians who honor the past rather than exploit it and seem to find fresh inspiration in every chorus.

The presence of the individual jazz artists in Sacramento is significant because the annual Los Angeles Classic Jazz Festival, held each Labor Day weekend, has, after a recent palace revolution, appeared to move toward a future policy of more traditional groups and fewer visiting firemen. What will happen to the stars, including Bob Wilbur, Kenny Davern and Bob Haggart, already announced for this year, is not clear.

Roger Krum, who is bassist with Sacramento’s popular Fulton Street jazz band and also executive director of the festival, says, “They had such a good mix down there in Los Angeles. I don’t know why they’d want to change it. We’re such a big festival we try to offer a bit of everything. This year we had the Zydeco Flames out of Berkeley, and I was a little nervous about zydeco, but they were very popular.” The festival is also offering several black blues groups. “Dixieland” no longer appears in its publicity.

Among the groups on hand are several youth bands encouraged by the festival over the years, with some of the amazingly gifted players schooled at summer jazz camps run by the festival. By now, several of the groups are touring and recording on their own.

One of the popular attractions has been Mr. Jack Daniels Original Silver Cornet Band, a brass-heavy big group with sleek arrangements, whose offerings range from a coronet solo as it might well have been heard on the village green a century ago, to a swinging version of “High Society,” with the famous clarinet chorus taken with soaring skill by a coronet trio.

Krum himself plays and loves the trad style, but also vastly admires the visiting instrumentalists. At a pre-festival performance Thursday night, when an out-of-town visitor was delayed, Krum sat in with one of the all-star groups.

“Someone asked me what it was like,” Krum says. “I said, I felt like a sapling in the forest.”

The festival concludes this afternoon.