Reaching Beyond the Traditional to Fill Seats

OK, here’s the problem facing the Playboy Jazz Festival every year: 2 x 17,965.

Why the math question? Because there are 17,965 Hollywood Bowl seats that have to be filled for each of the festival’s two consecutive days. How to do it? The answer this year appeared to be an acknowledgment of the impact that multiculturalism has on the new-millennium jazz scene. Toward that end, the festival’s opening program Saturday offered a number of quality musical moments that reached out to embrace elements from beyond the traditional scope of jazz.

As it turned out, however, Festival Productions, the company that prepares the event for Playboy, didn’t appear completely confident that multicultural jazz alone--despite the fact that it clearly produced the high points of the day--would be enough to pack the venue.

But let’s look at those high points before we address the festival’s actual solution to the problem of selling seats. Three of the best multiculturally oriented ensembles were programmed near the beginning and the end of the day’s schedule.

The Bay Area band Mingus Amungus started out with a firm dedication to the music of Charles Mingus. And his “Far Wells, Mill Valley” was a highlight of the band’s program. But Mingus Amungus, beyond its excellent lineup of soloists--especially trombonist Marty Wehner, saxophonist Joshi Marshall, keyboardist Muziki Roberson and leader Miles Perkins--seasoned its presentation with other fascinating ingredients, from a group of spirited dancers garbed in African costumes to the imaginative rapping of Martin Reynolds and Anita Johnson.

Bassist/singer Richard Bona, from Cameroon, followed, leading a six-piece international band in a set of numbers showcasing his sweet-sounding voice and remarkably virtuosic bass playing. African rhythms and traditional melodies coursed through some of the tunes, often countered by the stirring, bop-drenched lines of alto saxophonist Aaron Heick.

At the other end of the day, the Cuban charanga band Los Van Van offered a synthesis from a different direction, using a hard-punching horn section playing riff-styled accents in support of the highly idiosyncratic son-based music of bassist/leader Juan Formell. A melding of Cuban pop, charanga, son and jazz, Los Van Van’s music superbly illustrated one of the fascinating results of jazz music’s growing convergence with other world sounds.

Two other multicultural aspects surfaced in the central portions of Saturday’s festival. The best was the brilliant performance of Dianne Reeves. Always entertaining, she introduced her musicians and interacted with the crowd via improvised vocal passages. But the real mastery of her singing surfaced in the versatility she displayed with a spiritual, chant-like rendering of “Morning Has Broken” and a churning, rhythmically ecstatic romp through “Love for Sale.”

And on several tunes, reaching out for visual counterpoint to illustrate the roots aspects of her music, she was accompanied by talented young female performers from Crenshaw High School performing marvelously colorful African dances.

Yet another multicultural ensemble, the local band Ozomatli, delivered its own combination of jazz-tinged rap & roll at precisely the right time to generate the familiar late-afternoon dancing in the aisles. In this case, however, the jazz elements played what can most generously be described as a modest role.

In the festival’s more straight-ahead segments, guitarist John Scofield emphasized his current interest in funk rhythms with his quartet, largely abandoning the adventurous playing that has characterized his work for most of his career. And violinist Regina Carter’s quintet offered an attractive, if not especially compelling, collection of bop-tinged numbers, with occasional forays into Latin rhythms. In her better moments, she recalled the foot-tapping bravura of Stuff Smith, but her presentation--despite the intense drumming of Alvester Garnett--seemed a bit small in scope for the size of the Bowl.

The Count Basie Orchestra, conducted by Grover Mitchell, had more than enough size and intensity for the venue. But its program was handicapped by the now-predictable failure of the festival’s audio engineers to properly amplify the sound. Too often, piano, guitar and bass were driven to out-of-proportion levels, soloists played in front of microphones turned on halfway through their solos, and--most disturbingly--the audio manipulations completely prevented the orchestra’s players from establishing their own internal dynamics. (The performance of trumpeter/bandleader Bobby Rodriguez’s fine L.A. County High School for the Arts Jazz Ensemble--which opened the day--was plagued by similar problems.)

And what about that 2 x 17,965 problem? Two solutions: the retro swing band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and the smooth jazz duo Boney James & Rick Braun. Both brought most of the younger members of the crowd to their feet, while older jazz fans sat on their hands. Offering sets that were less about musical content than visual entertainment, they did what they were expected to do--help fill up all those seats.