Getting Down to the Essence of Jazz

It’s the essence, explains legendary Newport Jazz Festival promoter and pianist George Wein. He’s the man who put together the all-star Newport Jazz Millennium Celebration band that plays the Irvine Barclay Theatre tonight.

The essence of jazz, he says, allows three generations of musicians to come together in a single band and to make hot, beautiful music together.

Wein, who founded the Newport, R.I., festival in 1954 and booked jazz clubs before that, has plenty of experience bringing together different generations of jazz musicians and their fans.

The current eight-piece Newport band on tour spans ages 27 (trumpeter Nicholas Payton) through 73 (saxophonist Red Holloway).

In a phone interview from his home in New York, the 73-year-old Wein explained that essence is something all his musicians have.

“Jazz is a feeling, and that feeling comes through no matter if it’s a tune with a 4/4 beat or a New Orleans tempo. It comes through in the music of Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane. They’re all related. The harmonics might change, the tempos might get faster. But it all has that certain undefinable feeling that communicates to jazz lovers. I call it the essence.”

Musicians on the road with the Newport Millennium band say generational differences don’t matter as they might, say, in pop music or even painting. As Randy Brecker, the 54-year-old trumpeter in the Newport band’s front line, along with Payton and Holloway, says in a phone call from an East Lansing, Mich., hotel before a performance:

“In jazz, the parameters are a lot more equal because everybody knows the tunes. If you have a broad repertoire as a musician, and the skills, it just doesn’t matter what your age is.”

Guitarist Howard Alden, 41, a 10-year veteran of Newport touring groups who joins pianist Cedar Walton in the current rhythm section, says younger performers like to attach themselves to older ones.

“There’s a desire to go out with older, more experienced players and learn from them. I was out with a band a few years ago with Nicholas [Payton] and Clark Terry on trumpet, and Nicholas was very anxious to hang out and learn from Clark.”

Alden, who was born in Newport Beach and grew up in Huntington Beach, had a mentor himself, the late seven-string guitar innovator and fellow Huntington resident, George Van Eps.

Carl Jefferson, the Concord label record producer, “put us together and we just hit it off,” Alden said. “We recorded four albums together. I did things with George as often as I could.”

While much of that apprentice-style education was once conducted on jazz club bandstands, more and more of it now is done in the concert hall, Wein said.

“The difficult thing is to preserve what is great and still keep it fresh,” Wein said, noting the current institutional movement in jazz represented by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band and others.

When jazz artists play repertory pieces, “people accuse you of copying or of mimicking,” he said. “But great musicians don’t do that. They influence their own music.”

And trumpeter Brecker said: “There’s nothing wrong with jazz repertory. People see repertory music as a museum piece, but that’s not true. Jazz deserves to be heard in the concert halls now that there is a viable, 100-year history. And the main century in which jazz was produced, the century that saw it through its infancy, will always be the 20th century. And the music of the period will constantly need to be reexamined.”

“There’s a tendency to do repertory music in a particular way or style, in a language the musicians are comfortable with” Alden said, “and that brings it up to date.”

He noted that Payton is from New Orleans, “but he doesn’t play it note for note like they did in 1925. For one thing, he’s playing with bass and drums, not tuba and banjo. He may be drawing from an earlier style. But it’s his thing that he’s playing.”

Wein sees the jazz scene growing in both clubs and concert halls.

“The institutional approach has taken root; you can see it in the San Francisco Jazz Festival, with what John Clayton [the bassist, bandleader and composer] is doing at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, at the Smithsonian. But at the same time, the little clubs where musicians can go and play and learn and grow, they’ll always be there.”

The scene in New York seems to verify Wein’s view, Alden said.

“Clubs seem to disappear and reappear, thrive for a while and then move to other places. It goes in phases. The club scene will always endure because of musicians’ urge to play and people’s need to go to a place to socialize where there’s music. It’s a necessity. You can’t truly practice alone in your room.”

The Newport Jazz Millennium Celebration plays at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine, tonight at 8. $33-$38. (949) 854-4646.