This weekend’s Monterey Jazz Festival showed how the genre stays vital, as one generation passes the baton to the next.

It was another great weekend of music at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Pam Marino here, and if I had to pick a theme for the 66th festival, it would be the past transitioning into the future—or, as the well-used phrase goes, passing the baton.

It was a sweet goodbye to Artistic Director Tim Jackson after 33 amazing years, with a brief introduction on Sunday of the incoming director, Darin Atwater, the founding artistic director of the African American orchestra Soulful Symphony. Atwater promised to protect the festival that Jackson had so masterfully nurtured.

Audiences in the arena got to see the master of jazz song, Dianne Reeves, perform multiple times—in her own set on Saturday, and performing with others, including Terri Lyne Carrington and New Standards, on Sunday afternoon. It was an all-female band performing compositions all by women, with guests Reeves, MJF 2023 Artist-in-Residence Lakecia Benjamin and Samara Joy, right before her first headlining set on the Jimmy Lyons Stage.

To have Reeves on Saturday night followed by Joy on Sunday afternoon was also a passing of the baton of sorts—Reeves’ career is far from over, but Joy is the future of jazz singing. Both Reeves’ and Joy’s performances were highlights of the weekend. Joy’s audience was excited to see her and gave her two standing ovations with extended applause.

In his final year, Jackson invited artists important to him, leading off with Friday’s closing headliner, 83-year-old Herbie Hancock—one of the pioneers in experimenting with jazz fusion, funk and electro styles, starting back over 50 years ago.

It was then Jackson’s clever scheduling to bookend the festival on Sunday night with a direct musical descendant of Hancock’s: Thundercat, aka Stephen Bruner. As my colleague Rey Mashayekhi explained in his story in this week’s paper, Thundercat—like Hancock before him—is pushing the boundaries of funk, R&B, hip-hop, electronic and psychedelia, while staying rooted in the jazz he loves.

Thundercat’s electric, frenetic and at times dizzying music was not for everyone. Most of the older crowd left in the arena got up and left just a few minutes into his set. Yet not long after the exodus out of the arena ended, a new migration began—of young people making their way from the lawn and seats in the back up to the stage. They bopped their heads up and down and swayed to the music that probably sounded more like noise to their elders. 

I’ve never met Jackson, but after attending the festival for several years, I can tell from the schedules he’s been carefully including music that sweeps younger fans into the fold. It’s crucial for the festival, and jazz itself, to not just survive, but thrive.

In an interview I did with Lenora Helm Hammonds, chair of North Carolina Central University’s jazz studies program, for our Jazz Festival cover package, she told me the students of NCCU are educated in the roots of jazz, but are encouraged to add to the lexicon. “Jazz is a living music, it’s not dead music,” she told me.

For things to continue living, they have to grow, evolve, and, yes, even die—they have to make room for what’s new next. Jackson has planted the seeds. I’m looking forward to seeing what sprouts and grows under Atwater.

If you were able to attend, what were your thoughts about this year’s festival? Let me know what you think.