The Monterey Jazz Festival is a bhangra dance party, a Sunday morning praise service, a Detroit funk explosion, and a percussion-powered rumba session. It’s a floor-shaking blues stomp, a soul music celebration, a Western swing hoedown, and an R&B-powered rave. The world’s longest-running jazz festival continues to cast a wide net, and that’s because MJF is a kaleidoscopic plunge into the contemporary jazz scene, where no particular idiom, influence, or approach predominates. Jazz is a many-splendored art form these days, and the 67th annual festival offered a deep and wide look at some of the music’s state-of-the-art practitioners.
Launched in 1958 on the Monterey County Fairgrounds, MJF returned to its familiar haunts Sept. 27–29, though under significantly different circumstances, with its first new artistic director in three decades. Now curated by Darin Atwater, a Baltimore-based pianist, composer, producer, and educator who teaches at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, the festival felt markedly different on his maiden voyage, with a lighter San Francisco Bay Area footprint, an infusion of talent from the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area, and a deeper roster of gospel music than ever before.
Let’s start with half a dozen highlights. Encountering a previously unheard artist who leaves you dazzled is a great way to ease into the festival, and Chicago singer G. Thomas Allen delivered a sensational set on Friday. A Virginia-reared vocalist here making his West Coast debut as a bandleader (though he’s sung as a countertenor with Los Angeles Opera), he’s been gaining visibility since becoming the first man to win the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition in 2021. Crooning mostly in a silky falsetto, with occasional dips to a sweet tenor range, Allen was a revelation, effectively deploying the androgynous quality of his voice to reimagine the standards “Love for Sale,” that Cole Porter gem usually avoided by male vocalists, and “Good Morning Heartache,” a tribute to Billie Holiday.
Allen was equally impressive on original material, particularly “Love Affair,” the title track to his second album, which was released in May. Featuring an extended verse, the sumptuous melody showed he knows how to shape long phrases to subtly sustain and release tension. Accompanied by a strong quintet featuring Los Angeles drummer Jonathan Pinson, Allen also previewed the jazz scene’s overdue gender evolution, as his combo showcased incisive alto sax commentary by the Chicago-based Sharel Cassity. Long before the festival concluded, it was evident that more bands at MJF than ever before included female instrumentalists (whatever the sex of the bandleader).
If Friday started with a welcome discovery, the evening concluded with a raucous percussion party that almost ended before it began. Delayed by Hurricane Helene, Jason Marsalis didn’t make it to the West End Stage until several minutes into a New Orleans Groove Masters set that started half an hour late. The drums-forward group was already missing the foundational presence of Shannon Powell, an expert in ragtime and early Crescent City grooves, due to health issues. But with Weedie Braimah free after an earlier set with trumpeter Chief Adjuah, the Groove Masters triumvirate delved even deeper into the roots of New Orleans rhythms.
A master of the djembe who’s performed around the Bay Area in recent years with Adjuah (aka Christian Scott) and vocal star Cécile McLorin Salvant, Braimah was born in Ghana, raised in East St. Louis, and maintains deep ties to New Orleans. With Marsalis alternating between vibes and trap set, the group played an epic version of the folk song “Li’l Liza Jane” driven by Herlin Riley’s tambourine and cymbal work, reminiscent of a revival meeting. With a damp fog teasing the festival’s most windblown stage, the audience thinned out past 11 p.m., but the six-piece band’s percussion conflagration warded off the chill.
For decades, the most intimate space on the fairgrounds has been the Pacific Jazz Cafe, which is now the only indoor venue the festival uses. There were several times during the weekend when a trio on one of the outdoor stages seemed like it would be better suited to the cafe. In the case of Puerto Rican alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón and Venezuelan pianist Luis Perdomo, who played long sets on Saturday and Sunday, the cafe’s confines perfectly served their musical dialogue. Focusing on songs from El Arte del Bolero, their duo Latin American Songbook project that’s yielded two acclaimed albums (so far), Zenón and Perdomo gave a master class in close listening, intuitive interplay, and sheer sublime lyricism.
Caressing each melody with unabashed affection, the two hewed closely to Spanish-language standards by composers from their homelands as well as Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Panama, in the case of Rubén Blades’s acutely observed ballad “Paula C.” Only after delivering a melody in its entirety did Zenón and Perdomo take flight, though their improvised passages remained at least loosely tethered to the source material. One didn’t have to be familiar with all or any of the songs to be swept away by rapturous ballads like “La Vida Es un Sueño” by Cuban maestro Arsenio Rodríguez. The cafe’s only drawback was the emcee, who couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to pronounce the artists’ names, mangling Perdomo differently each night. An offhand age-related dig at Willie Nelson (who disses Willie Nelson?) struck a particularly sour note amid two exceptional sets.
Picking a favorite outdoor set is tough. Even though I caught Hiromi’s Sonicwonder quartet at Yoshi’s in Oakland last year, I ended up very pleased not to have skipped the Japanese keyboardist and composer’s turn in the main arena on Saturday.
Featuring the commanding trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, electric bass master Hadrien Feraud, and precision-minded drummer Gene Coye, Hiromi’s group ranges widely, navigating her incident-rich pieces with playful authority, moving from densely arranged passages at breakneck tempos to hushed, spacious improvised sections. Hiromi revels in quirky, bouncy keyboard settings, effectively integrating an array of video game tones into much larger narratives in pieces like the antic “Sonicwonderland” and the vividly optimistic “Utopia.” The fun that musicians have together onstage doesn’t always transmit to the audience, but with this quartet, the playground welcomes everyone.
I spent much of Sunday camped out on the oak-strewn grounds by the Garden Stage, which has been rechristened the Tim Jackson Garden Stage in honor of Atwater’s predecessor as artistic director, who created the festival’s contemporary template. An afternoon set by the Julia Keefe Indigenous Jazz Ensemble, a nonet distilled from the big band Keefe co-leads with powerhouse trumpeter Delbert Anderson, featured a fascinating program that illuminated the little-known jazz contributions of Indigenous peoples from Canada to South America. Keefe, who hails from the Nez Perce people of the Pacific Northwest, is a bright-toned vocalist who sometimes leans more heavily on dexterous scatting than lyric interpretation.
She gives her bandmates plenty of room to represent their own tribes and traditions, conducting the band when she’s not singing. One high point was a sacred song arranged like a joyful folk hymn by bassist and vocalist Mali Obomsawin, from Quebec’s Abenaki First Nation at Odanak. “Sonnet,” Keefe’s setting of a Pablo Neruda poem, displayed a rare gift for melodic development, and a requisite romp through the medicine chant “Witchi-Tai-To” displayed the band’s rambunctious side. A hit for the late tenor saxophonist Jim Pepper, whose Kaw and Muscogee Creek identity made him one of jazz’s most visible Native American artists in the 1970s and ’80s, the incantatory song represented yet another promising path for a band with a truly expansive writ.
Sacred music was also the bedrock of one of the festival’s last sets on Sunday, by James Brandon Lewis’s Red Lily Quintet. An elemental tenor saxophonist with a compact, forceful tone, Lewis has emerged in recent years as both a focused conceptualist and a far-flung collaborator whose presence can transform an array of situations and settings. Monterey marks his third appearance in the region in the past six weeks, including several dates with the Messthetics, a sinewy power trio built on the rhythm section tandem of the storied D.C. punk band Fugazi, and as a special guest with guitarist Marc Ribot at the SFJAZZ Center.
Lewis’s Red Lily Quintet focused on music from the band’s 2023 tribute to gospel music legend Mahalia Jackson, For Mahalia, With Love, honoring and then transforming spirituals like “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “Go Down Moses.”
Featuring drummer Chad Taylor (who also played Ribot’s SFJAZZ concert), cornetist Kirk Knuffke, bassist Chris Lightcap, and cellist Janel Leppin, the quintet is as potent as any band on the scene. With Leppin and Lightcap often bowing together, Red Lily’s low end felt like a mighty river. An ideal foil for Lewis, who carves his phrases with long, inexorable strokes, Knuffke coaxed an expressive menagerie of sounds out of his horn, jabbing, pushing, guiding, and buoying the saxophonist’s lines. “Wade in the Water” gathered momentum before bursting forth in a torrent. This Red Lily is as mighty as a rose and served as a wondrous bookend to the gospel programs that started the day on the Garden Stage, like pianist Tammy Hall’s set with the Texas Southern University Gospel Choir.
Mea culpas. I missed several of MJF’s signature initiatives this year, including Robert Glasper’s festival commission and bassist Kyle Eastwood’s “Eastwood Symphonic,” a program of orchestral music gleaned from the films of his father, Clint Eastwood.
I often find myself more engaged with music on the smaller stages, but some artists fully inhabit the arena stage that still carries the Monterey Pop scorch mark from Jimi Hendrix’s torched Stratocaster, like Sunday’s set by Oaxacan American star Lila Downs (who brings her Día de los Muertos extravaganza to Oakland’s Paramount Theatre on Oct. 12). I only caught the end of Saturday’s set by bassist Stanley Clarke’s new group, 4EVER, but his mostly acoustic combo celebrating the legacy of Chick Corea’s band Return to Forever bristles with young talent. Joined by Hiromi on piano for a concluding romp through Corea’s “No Mystery,” the band delivered one of the festival’s most thrilling performances.
Speaking of thrilling, Bay Area guitarist Mimi Fox’s organ trio, with Brian Ho on Hammond B-3 and drummer Lorca Hart, played a consistently blazing Saturday afternoon set on the Garden Stage. (The trio hits Yoshi’s on Oct. 30.)
With bassist Eric Wheeler and drummer Allan Mednard, harpist Brandee Younger’s trio seems to possesse boundless potential, judging by the group’s West End set on Sunday. Earlier that same day, the long-running collective trio Tarbaby, with drummer Nasheet Waits, bassist Eric Revis, and pianist Orrin Evans, played a brilliant West End set, including Andrew Hill’s “Reconciliation,” though the band’s dynamic range was challenged by sound bleeding over from the other stages. Drummer Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East got the audience up and dancing with a Punjabi party song on the Garden Stage later that evening.
Among several other first-time encounters, my biggest revelation was pianist Sean Mason. I caught him last summer on the Garden Stage accompanying the great singer Catherine Russell. He returned to the venue this year with a quartet featuring drummer Domo Branch (of the Wynton Marsalis Septet). Focusing on music from his debut album, The Southern Suite, Mason played on the Garden Stage on Friday with a depth of feeling and timeless sense of swing that is rare indeed. He brings his quartet to Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage on Oct. 13, another chance to catch him if you missed Monterey this year.
In Atwater, MJF is in smart, capable hands. He’s said he doesn’t want to make radical changes, but the festival is evolving, as it must, and it’s looking to be a fascinating ride.
