Prime music just the way it’s made at Monterey

The Monterey Jazz Festival, with its golden anniversary coming later this year, is by most estimates the world’s longest-running continuous jazz festival. But its more significant attribute has always been that music, not longevity, is the festival’s heart and soul.

So it was appropriate that the festival’s 50th Anniversary Tour All-Stars at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Friday night offered nearly 2 1/2 hours of prime, straight-ahead, mainstream jazz. As in the festival, there were no light shows, no smoke machines, no eardrum-shattering decibels, just a continuing flow of ever-engaging music from trumpeter Terence Blanchard, tenor saxophonist-flutist James Moody, pianist Benny Green, bassist Derrick Hodge, drummer Kendrick Scott and singer Nnenna Freelon.

The pace was set early, if a bit tepidly, in a romp through the melodic maze of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Bebop.” Although the rhythm section in particular seemed to need a few minutes to find its acoustic togetherness, Blanchard and Moody ripped through choruses, gradually urging the music into a swinging groove that prevailed for the rest of the evening.

The contrasting solo styles of the two horn players reflected the appealing range of musical individuality that has always been characteristic of the Monterey Festival programs.

Blanchard’s improvisational passion, always present in the ascending emotional arcs of his solos, was enhanced by a near-vocalized use of slippery, half-valve tones, especially during a series of dark, atmospheric solos on a pair of selections from his New Orleans-inspired CD “A Tale of God’s Will.”

Moody, on the other hand, has always been a melodist, pure and simple. Whether he was playing a slow-grind blues chorus or ripping fast-fingered runs, a constant melodic focus -- filled with listener-friendly musical handles and an occasional emotional yelp -- was at the center of every one of his choruses.

Freelon was superb, especially during her gorgeous renderings of “Skylark” and “Misty.” A thoroughly mature interpretive stylist, she has also refined her voice, her tone shimmering with across-the-spectrum tonal texture, her pitch spot-on. That came on top of the sheer fun of her scat singing with Moody on “Just Squeeze Me” and the sensitivity of her lyric writing (and interpreting) for Gerald Wilson’s “Romance (Winter Love).”

The evening was exactly what it was advertised to be -- a mini-version, live snapshot of the Monterey Festival in action. And it succeeded in what it attempted to do -- remind jazz fans that the real festival will again set up its tents in September for another not-to-be-missed celebration of America’s music.