JAZZ REVIEW : Pasadena Fest Reaches for Challenging, Satisfying Mix

The setting very nearly stole the show at Sunday’s all-day installment of the Pasadena Jazz Festival. With the Ambassador Auditorium Mall overflowing with outdoor restaurants and free music events, with a welcoming greensward and a cool breeze to temper the August sun, the afternoon’s concert acts--singer Nnenna Freelon and guitarist Earl Klugh--had plenty of appealing open-air competition.

In the case of Freelon, coming indoors was well worth the effort. A singer with extraordinary technical faculties, she was as comfortable with the soaring, lyrical imagery of “Skylark” as she was with the more verbally demanding convolutions of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” Still at an early stage in her career, Freelon is not yet a fully formed talent, but she clearly has the capacity to make a significant impact on the jazz vocal scene.

Klugh would have been better off outside on the mall. His light and frothy music is not the stuff to experience while sitting in a concert venue. While Klugh’s guitar playing is adroit, and his way with a tune skillful, his band’s briskly efficient performance had neither the improvisational urgency nor the propulsive swing one hopes for in first-rate jazz. Heard as background sound in an amiable atmosphere of white wine and summer skies, it might have found its perfect arena of expression.

The two groups that provided the free mall music--the Rickey Woodard Quintet and the Frank Vignola Trio--in fact offered considerably more than background sounds.

Woodard, heard to advantage on Saturday night’s program, continued to offer convincing evidence of his rapid growth as a major jazz artist. His major name ensemble, which featured Bill Cunliffe on piano, Ray Brown on trumpet, John Littleton on bass and Ralph Penland on drums, could easily have been a festival headliner.

Guitarist Vignola played an easygoing set, bristling with mainstream improvisation and brightened by the inclusion of such unexpected items as “Tico, Tico” and “String of Pearls.”

The Benny Green Trio opened the evening event with a performance that was a pyrotechnical delight. Green’s phenomenal pianistics--replete with mind-blurring octave runs and string-busting, percussive chording--were matched at every turn by bassist Christian McBride’s equally remarkable bass playing.

Still, as entertaining--even awesome--as it may have been, there was the nagging feeling that too much of the Green Trio’s presentation was a sumptuous dessert for the ear, rich in taste and texture, but overloaded with calories and a bit lacking in musically nutritional substance.

With the festival’s final group--the all-world trio of Joe Henderson, Al Foster and George Mraz--technical displays, flashy showmanship and facile solutions were set aside in pursuit of a penetrating, white-light view into the music. It was not an easy experience for the audience, and many listeners chose to leave early. But those who remained were rewarded with jazz improvisation refined to its very essence, improvisation that had no purpose other than a measuring of the creative mind against the infinite potential for musical expression.

The Henderson Trio was a courageous choice as the festival’s climactic act--especially so as an apparent revelation of the desire to produce a celebration that was both musically entertaining and creatively challenging. This year, the Pasadena Jazz Festival succeeded on both counts.

But the empty seats that dotted the house at each performance (less so on Saturday night) are not encouraging signs of audience receptivity to eclectic programming and could impact next year’s event.

At the moment, the festival’s mixture of accessible contemporary jazz with mainstream music and cutting-edge artists seems just right. Combined with a lovely outdoor venue and free community access to some of the events, it is a formula that should, eventually, result in a ongoing successful festival. But it will take time. If the empty seats drive the 1995 Pasadena Jazz Festival programmers toward a more guaranteed commercial route, the unique character of this excellent small jazz celebration will be lost.