Festival Blends Jazz and Fans Into a Big Party at the Bowl

The Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl is less a concert of music than it is a happening--a vast, spontaneous action piece that involves the audience as much as the performers.

Take Sunday’s program--the second day of the two-day event--for example. A mixed bag of pop, jazz and Latin music, it had little real identity of its own. The actual event was a product of the symbiotic interaction that took place between the performers and the random, unpredictable reactions of the crowd.

The day unfolded in broad, sweeping sections. For the first few hours, the program was dedicated to youthful ensembles: the Mike Holober Quintet, winner of the Cognac Hennessey Jazz Search, and the Thelonious Monk Institute Jazz Ambassadors, followed by local jazz wizards, the Meeting.

The audience involvement was minimal. With only 20% to 25% of the seats filled, primary energy was devoted to finding locations, lugging in coolers and squeezing the paraphernalia required for a long spring day into minimal space.

With the arrival of Roy Hargrove’s Latin-tinged ensemble Crisol, there was a perceptible shift. The advent of the most attractive jazz portion of the program, a portion that continued with Elvin Jones, the Count Basie Orchestra, Bill Cosby’s All-Star band and Tito Puente, had begun.

That alone was enough to generate receptivity from the crowd, which had by then reached perhaps 60% of capacity. Even with the enthusiastic response for some of the solos, however, there still was a great deal of flow around the Bowl--people meeting and greeting, trekking to the food stands, starting their evening dining setups.

At the very least, there was a sense of disengagement, as though the happening had not yet really begun, as though performers and audience had not yet found a way to synchronize.

One might have expected that to change with Puente, a master at spicing the juices in unresponsive listeners. But most of his set (with the Basie Orchestra as backup) was devoted to strident vocals from a singer named India. People in the audience, for the most part, sat on their hands.

Around 6:30 p.m., that changed when India left, and Puente and the Basie players began a familiar rhythmic vamp. The crowd responded instantly, recognizing the irresistible opening pulsations of “Oye Como Va.”

The result was like opening the interactive floodgates, and the second phase of the happening took off. Released from their lethargy, from their focus on food, from their fascination with the parade of characters moving through the aisles, the audience eagerly leaped to its feet. The next 10 minutes were consumed by a multi-armed conga line that swarmed around the Bowl in all directions.

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By this point, the jazz happening had moved beyond its musical phase, with the quality of the playing becoming less important and the presence of the audience more apparent. Najee underscored that fact, playing his saxophone Kenny G-style while walking through the aisles.

Etta James and her hard-swinging Roots Band followed, triggered a massive display of white handkerchief- (and towel- and napkin-) waving that transformed the Bowl into something resembling a field of wind-swept cotton plants. And George Benson, closing the show, produced a set of flat-out crowd-pleasing pop nuggets.

From a purely musical perspective, the festival required a willingness to hear through flabby sets and sometimes shoddy audio mixing. But there were high points: the enthusiasm of the two opening young groups; Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes’ extraordinary piano and Russell Malone’s hard-driving guitar work with Crisol; Nicholas Payton’s trumpeting with the fiery drums of Elvin Jones; Cedar Walton’s piano and Rufus Harley’s jazz bagpiping with host Bill Cosby’s band, the Cos of Good Music III; the tenor saxophone work of David Sanchez and Javon Jackson (with Jones); James’ ability to bring attractive jazz qualities into her powerful blues singing.

But it was as a sheer jazz happening that Sunday’s program worked best. And appropriately so, because it clearly is staged and produced as an event, as a daylong start-of-summer outdoor party, tailored primarily for engagement between performers and listeners. On that count, the 19th Playboy Jazz Festival has to be considered a substantial success.