A Timeless Mix of Styles at L.A. Classic Jazz Festival

The 11th annual L.A. Classic Jazz Festival, concluding today at two airport area hotels, got away to an operationally uncertain but musically splendid start over the weekend. A new administration had had little time to conquer the testing logistics of importing several dozen musicians from all over the world. Clarinet star Ken Peplowski was a no-show because his plane ticket never arrived. The printed program had to have an insert because of the number of schedule changes.

But it is the music that matters. As before, the mix ran from the most stoutly preservationist of trad (“Struttin’ With Some Barbecue” seems to be this year’s anthem of choice) to the lively junction where mainstream edges toward the flatted fifths of bop.

Bach has been a sort of ghostly presence at this year’s event. The number of Bach-like entwining contrapuntal choruses, dazzling in conception and execution, has been astonishing. The interplay between pianist Dick Hyman and guitarist Howard Alden on a very fast “How High the Moon” at a Friday afternoon set was breathtakingly beautiful.

There were more contrapuntal fireworks between cornetist Warren Vache and soprano saxman Bob Wilbur on, of all infrequent choices here, “Strike Up the Band” (taken at 100-yard-dash tempo), and between Vache and Jackie Coon on fluegelhorn during a Saturday night set. You were reminded, not for the first time, that jazz can be beautiful as well as propulsive.

The late player-arranger Dick Cary’s Tuesday night rehearsal band reassembled in a double-session tribute to him, with Dick Hamilton as leader (doubling on piano and trumpet, as Cary often did). Cary, who died in April, left a great legacy of exciting and demanding charts, including many originals. The group, with trombonist Betty O’Hara and tenor saxman Dick Hafer chief among the soloists, did them and Cary full justice.

Drummer Louis Bellson gave a three-hour dance concert Saturday night with a powerhouse and well-disciplined big band. Several of the other drummers in residence fell by to pay homage to the last of the great band-era percussionists, now 70, but seemingly inexhaustible with his energy and inventiveness.

For jazz esoterica, nothing quite matched the Canadian vibraphonist Peter Appleyard’s musical and visual impersonations of his fellow mallet-wielders Terry Gibbs, Milt Jackson, Red Norvo and Lionel Hampton--a deft and amusing historical footnote.

Several foreign groups with enthusiastic followings here were on hand again: Fat Sam’s from Scotland, Paco Gatsby from Guatemala, Greentown from Slovenia, Yoshio Toyama from Tokyo and Lillian Boutte from Hamburg (by way of New Orleans). Gatsby gives jazz a distinctly Latin flavor, but the others re-import the American sound with fidelity augmented by crowd-pleasing antics. Toyama echoes Louis Armstrong most remarkably.

The most sheerly entertaining among the many domestic groups may well be Sorta Dixie, a long-running Las Vegas lounge act that alternates its expert and gung-ho playing with some four-part vocal harmony. It brings down the house (always ready for nostalgia anyway) with “Juke Box Saturday Night,” the Glenn Miller version augmented by tributes to the Dorsey brothers and the Four Freshmen.

Festivals are no easier to summarize than smorgasbords, yard sales or anthologies. What the classic proves again, however, is that jazz exists along a timeless spectrum of approaches, but at its heart always are individual performers, playing and singing with skill, imagination and passion.