Event High in Quality, Not Visibility

The annual festival that has taken place at Drew University during the past decade is a potent secret weapon for jazz in the Southland. More than any other event, it displays Los Angeles jazz in its full range of persuasive styles, presented in a pleasant, outdoor setting, surrounded by a colorful marketplace and aromatic food stands.

This year’s “Jazz at Drew 2001” program was no exception. Opening Saturday with a lineup that included Les McCann, the Jazz Crusaders, Jerry “The Iceman” Butler and others, it continued with an even more expansive collection of artists on Sunday afternoon, headlined by Dionne Warwick.

Sounding in rare form, Warwick offered four of her greatest hits: “Alfie,” “That’s What Friends Are For,” “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” and, to close, “What the World Needs Now.” The latter song, performed a few hours after the United States launched air attacks on Afghanistan, clearly had an emotional impact upon the large crowd, who joined Warwick in a poignant rendering of its final lines.

Warwick’s set was followed by a series of tributes to Southland jazz greats--Billy Higgins, Horace Silver, Al McKibbon and Harold Land Sr.--performed by a 50-member orchestra conducted by Yvette M. Devereaux. Although the orchestral segment started a bit shakily with a “Symphonic Prelude” that was actually a medley of songs from Gershwin’s “Girl Crazy,” Devereaux and her players found increasingly confident linkage as the program progressed.

Earlier in the afternoon, a series of first-rate small-group episodes featured saxophonist Billy Mitchell’s straight-ahead group, the drum-driven energies of Sherman Ferguson’s Jazz Union, and the envelope-stretching sounds of trombonist Phil Ranelin with his Tribe Renaissance, as well as appearances by Lamont Joseph with Kinfolk and the Billy’s Children Drum Workshop.

Although the Sunday turnout for “Jazz at Drew 2001” was undoubtedly impacted by the breaking news of the day, the crowd had filled out substantially by the late afternoon. But the event still seems to have far too low a profile.

In part, that can be attributed to the fact that executive producer Roland H. Betts has had a minimal promotion budget, a direct consequence of the fact that the festival has only been renewed on an annual basis by Drew University. But a month ago, “Jazz at Drew” became an established entity within the university. One can only hope that this superb event will no longer be an insider’s secret.