Bellevue Served a Jazz Festival for the Community

Posted on 14. Jun, 2010 by Hector Aviles in Blog

There are events for a specific focused group of people that love a particular specialty, be that a particular type of music, art, dances, food, cause, or interest. The Bellevue Jazz Festivalwent beyond its focus group to share the jazz experience with the broader Bellevue area community. The combination of premium pay events with nationally known performers, to free events with local artists, and ranging from the experienced veteran musician to the novice student, made this a very special event.

Terence Blanchard: a Quintet of Virtuosos

Terence Blanchard and Fabian Almazan

I was able to see start trumpet player Terence Blanchard in the Saturday main (pay) event. Blanchard played with his Quintet, which is composed of four very talented musicians, in addition to Terence. Unfortunately, I was relying on the names of them to be published somewhere, but I guess I was wrong. Anyways, the Quintet was composed of the talented Cuban pianist Fabian Almazan, who lives in New York, an 18 year-old bassist, who was in his 2^nd gig with the quintet, an outstanding drum player, and Terence sidekick on the horns, a great sax player from Arizona. If you happen to know the names of the others I missed, please share them in a comment below.

I mostly enjoyed the performance by Terence Blanchard Quintet. I say mostly, because there were parts of where I would have preferred a little more variety in the music. Here’s my little rant. Although the group had a lot of talent and sounded very good, a couple of consecutive songs had Blanchard doing a trumpet solo followed by a sax solo and then yet another band member solo, back-to-back-to-back, which for me caused a bit of boredom. Maybe I’m not a truly trained jazz aficionado yet, one that appreciates this type of performance coming from an acclaimed musician who has won at least one Grammy. But to me the solos where too long and consecutive in a couple of songs, to the point that you almost couldn’t tell one song form the other. I obviously like solos in jazz; improvisation is key to good jazz. But I like it best when the theme of the song is the base for the solos and the band comes back to it from time to time so you keep the song as the basis for the solos. When there are so many solos that you forget what the song itself sounded like, then I tend to fall into boredom. So although I enjoyed most of the performance, there were a few dull moments for me.

Bellevue Jazz Festival for the Community

After the Terence Blanchard concert, I walked with my friend Bart to the Courtyard Hotel a block away, where they had the jazz jam session. First there was a jazz orchestra playing, and that gave way to the jam session, led by a handful of musicians of the band, but opened to anyone to come up and jam. Here there were experienced musicians as well as local area students, who brought their horn to jam away. Even a member of the band, who plays trumpet, decided to instead sing during the jam session, and she did it quite well. All in all, I enjoyed seeing young and veterans jam together as you realize that the Bellevue Jazz Festival provides a great avenue for the community to get involved and participate at all levels.

These were just a couple of the activities that the Jazz Festival had. My friend Bart was the MC for the free high school band performances at the Bellevue Museum of Art. I would have loved to see the Raising Stars event, where selected students team up with professional jazz musicians to play in small ensembles, giving them the opportunity to improvise and get the feel for the music.

Enjoyable Community Jazz Festival

All music festivals are enjoyable. They bring music to the community and that normally you get to see acts that you wouldn’t otherwise see. Leslie Lloyd, the Director of Bellevue Jazz Festival commented in an interview before the start of the festival that they try to bring artists that otherwise we might not get a chance to see. So she will not bring artist who come frequently to private jazz clubs in Seattle, because most jazz fans would have seen them and will have little incentive to come see them again.

As much as we talk about Jazz not having a young following these days, events that are accessible for the entire community deserve our backing and sponsorship. As a blogger I like to do my part to spread the word about these events, as there are many cases where people don’t attend because they don’t know about the events. The more we attend this type of events, the more likely it is that they will continue to be organized year after year, providing us the opportunity to see the best artists come to town, and see local artists get their chance to expose their music. I also like to blog about these events as a way to share best practices with you. Perhaps you can bring up ideas in your community to those that organize music events so that they take a page from events like the Bellevue Jazz Festival which give back to the community.