Music to be consoled by

SAN FRANCISCO -- Just at the pause of intermission Sunday night at the McCoy Tyner-Elvin Jones show, capping off the first weekend of the San Francisco Jazz Festival, the word came over radios and pagers: It would have to be another year.

For five days, rabid jazz and Giant fans had had their attention split -- running out to catch the score at some overstuffed bar across the street; plugged into MP3s set to radio mode; phones placed on vibrate.

But about 8:20 p.m., just as Tyner’s lush big band set was coasting to a close, the news was final: The Giants had lost the World Series. Ear buds were removed. Palm Pilots went back into purses and breast pockets.

“Well, the good news is,” said one fan, leaning back into the plush of his orchestra seat, putting his cell phone away, zipping his pocket with a crisp sense of finality, “now the city can get down to singular business” -- deterred but undaunted: the business of jazz.

It was left to master trapsman Jones to put all in perspective and provide the balm. Jones, looking the part of a healer, in his long white robes and matching pants, set about to raise spirits. Intuitively he revisited a piece played at another show, just days before, “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” and showered his shimmering high-hat and ebullient smiles on downcast Giant fans.

All of it is a far cry from the pumped-up mood of Wednesday, as fans crushed into the city. At that point, no one was fooling themselves. All those men in windbreakers clustered at the lip of freeway off-ramps waving laminated orange-and-black signs declaring “I need tickets” clearly meant Pac Bell Park, not the Regency Center where opening festivities for the 20th anniversary of the city’s jazz festival were set to kick off.

So be it. But the festival folks could dream.

And by the weekend, the extrapolations on jazz are again illustrated -- from Wayne Shorter and Branford Marsalis’ straight-ahead, no-sleight-of-hand prowess to Ruben Blades and his fusion of pop rock and tropical sounds. It’s jazz as a life force, not a museum piece.

While some might quibble that some of it might not meet our textbook notion of jazz, it really is about what is being created in a big dark room, the magic of watching something grow and push forward. But attempting to launch a grand-scale event -- 18 days, 50-plus ensembles, 11 venues -- while an entire city is in the midst of a collective teeth-clench seems an unfortunate set of circumstances.

No matter. Though jazz struggles -- in market share and with attracting an audience of young fans -- it is seldom daunted over the long haul. Its mystique goes a long way. And in a city known for its finer things, from food to literature, and those who want to be the first or only to have sampled them, hundreds of Bay Area residents and jazz itinerants are leaving their easy chairs to see what it looks like up close.

They come, perhaps because jazz festivals too have their own mystique, familiar images embroidered on them: a lone-wolf musician with some bulky silhouette of an instrument slung across his back; women in sleeveless summer sheaths relaxing with a picnic, eyes fixed on the stage a la Bert Stern’s watercolor-like time capsule, “Jazz on a Summer Day,” a documentary of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.

While in reality today’s jazz visual motif might be more a cross of Birkenstocks and Banana Republic instead of stingy brims and wingtips, SF Jazz indeed steps out with singular style. With an honor roll of jazz dignitaries, Ellis Marsalis and Yusef Lateef, Shirley Horn and Ornette Coleman, one would be hard pressed to find a weak spot on the card.

Opening night, the festival makes itself at home in the grand and drafty set of ballrooms and amber-lit antechambers in the Regency Center complex at the corner of Van Ness and Sutter. The christening celebration, “New Orleans in SF,” is a Chinese box sort of an event, a party within a party within a party, progressing in three rooms simultaneously, overlapping like good conversation.

Downstairs in the Sutter Room, Mitch Woods’ Big Easy Boogie launches in. Woods, in a lilac suit and -- if you could believe it -- an even louder wide tie, cuts blusey turns, then kicks it up a notch with breathless, thundering runs across the piano keyboard. The hope is to coax movement out of the people marooned semi-motionless on the dance floor, people like Joy Hawkins, from Berkeley, there in her feathered Mardi Gras mask, which she alternately dons atop her head, giving it the air of a feathered pillbox hat.

Hawkins watches Woods, with his head up, all black lacquer hair and antic expression, pounding out something he calls “rock-a-boogie.” He’s accompanied by a phalanx of men with big hats and big horns who look like they just finished a good game of chess in front of the old St. Louis Cathedral. Woods amps up the mood as early arrivals, draped in carnival throws, line up for New Orleanean specialties including jambalaya (both seafood and vegetarian, after all it is San Francisco). He mixes a taste of the traditional -- Professor Longhair -- with some bobbing Jerry Lee Lewis-style shimmy rhythms.

Spell working, head bobbing, Hawkins explains she “wouldn’t have missed this for the world.” A festival groupie, she travels from one celebration to the next. This one though, was important for other reasons: “This is the 20th year. Oh, I just had to be here for this one.”

Important in that the festival has shot up like a weed. Run by the nonprofit SF Jazz organization, co-founded by Randall Kline, it’s grown from a three-day-long event called “Jazz in the City” that took place at two venues. Now, it is considered to be one of the most important and influential jazz events on the West Coast. Its relatively long history inspires Hurricane punch-fueled one-upmanship tales: “Now, I don’t know if you were here for Ornette Coleman’s cut-’n’-paste show in 1994?” ... “Were you here for Joshua Redman’s debut in ‘84? Now that was a show.”

SF Jazz has been long committed to a diversity of styles, interpretations and orientations (yes, Merle Haggard indeed is set to perform a Bob Wills/Texas swing tribute on Nov. 8). Proceeds from the festival, and other year-round programming, are funneled into various jazz education programs, helping to nurture the next generation -- players, aficionados, fans, the inheritors.

Some of that schooling is going on here. One flight above, as if we are watching evolution take place right before our eyes, saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., the “King of Nouveau Swing,” snaps up the musical baton and races forward.

Son of a late great Mardi Gras Indian chief and informed by the hip-hop generation, the junior Harrison knows a little something about braiding the traditional squawk and strut of the second line with smooth Ramsey Lewis grooves, tweaked with hip hop’s relationship to funk. The lagniappe: drummer Idris Muhammad, sitting behind his kit as if behind a throne in his bright teal tam, knocking it out. All of which eventually expands into its own miniature Mardi Gras celebration: Harrison out of his suit, now draped in feathers; the stage as dim as a bayou.

By the time the Dirty Dozen Brass Band commandeers the stage, stretching and teasing rhythms, they’ve long reworked not just the concept of “social and pleasure club,” but the very definition of social and pleasure. This post-modern benevolent society bends, flaunts and works it. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing” becomes not a statement, but a taunt. They scratch out the rules and rewrite them as they go; second-line rowdiness becomes avant-praise music.They perform in jeans and T-shirts and coveralls, sleeves rolled up. Why? Because jazz is work.

The next few nights set the tone, elaborate on this idea of inheritors and antecedents -- intersections and amalgamations. Jazz is a high-wire act. It is that invisible thread that tethers musician to musician, the audience to the stage, allowing all those heart-in-the throat moments to happen.

Part of Thursday’s evening of “Global Guitars,” Malian guitarist Djelimady Tounkara, leader of the legendary Super Rail Band, sits shoulder to shoulder with the rest of his traveling ensemble -- as if before a coffee table -- plinking out silvery, wind-chime notes.

He reaches back to his early repertoire to tell griot stories, shot through with flashes of flamenco, Western classical guitar -- fluid, borderless -- all the while a grateful smile hovering on his face.

Basking in the glow, guitarist Charlie Hunter and Idris Muhammad share an intimate corner of that very stage. Muhammad sends up rhythms from Cuba and Africa, some on his kit, others on a hollowed-out log -- exotic flowers all of them. Hunter returns with a tone so warm and fat and textured that the stage sounds as if it is full of horns, vibes and a Hammond B3 -- just for starters.

Like Harrison, Hunter has been shaped as much by funk, pop, hip-hop and reggae as by jazz -- a stepping-stone in his own right. The mood of the room reflects it.

A younger crowd in flip-flops and cargo shorts fills up the main space. By now the event has taken on the vibe of a good house party. Music and diversion in many rooms. A joint fires up. Dancing solo is not just allowed, but encouraged. Jazz band or jam band? Doesn’t matter what it’s called, as long as the spirit is moved.

Friday night at the Masonic Auditorium atop Nob Hill, Brazilian national treasure Caetano Veloso struts out on a minimalist stage, skinny and self-sure, ready to show this well-heeled packed-to-the-rafters crowd how very much can be done with so very little. Is he a god or rocker? A sambaista? A performance artist? All of the above?

Veloso defies categorization as does the music he has drifted toward and then resculpted for decades.

He underscores the blurred lines and abstractions, strumming an open-bodied guitar rimmed in black that looks more like a charcoal sketch, a dashed-off Picasso.

He belts out a psychedelic-tinged anthem in Portuguese. Then dips into a tiny, jewel-box version of “Stars Fell on Alabama” in bossa nova pose, one leg draped over the other, toes tipped slightly upward -- illustrating with little fuss that there is not as much of a distance between jazz and its relations as we’d like to think.

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More S.F. Jazz

What: San Francisco Jazz Festival

Where: various locations

Highlights: Michel Camilo Trio, Wednesday;

Shirley Horn and Ahmad Jamal trios, Saturday;

Ornette Coleman Trio, Nov. 7;

Bobby McFerrin with special guests, Nov. 9.

Ends: Nov. 10

Price: various

Contact: (415) 776-1999 or www.sfjazz.org