Tim Jackson Reigns Over Monterey Jazz Festival (sidebar)

“I never really sat down at one point and said ‘I’m going to make music my career.”

~ Tim Jackson

“[Jackson] will get out of the rut…He’ll be a great deal more adventurous”

~ Philip Elwood, jazz critic

Keeping Up The Score

Jazz – as Perot might say – is a lot like crab grass. It’s roots go deep, and it refuses to die.

With its origins in African tribal music, evolving through slave spirituals, the speak-easies of the 1920s, New Orleans jazz, Big Band music, bebop and on into fusion and beyond, jazz waned during rock ‘n’ roll’s heyday in the ‘60s, only to re-emerge today in a host of new directions.

“I don’t really think jazz knows where it’s going, or where it’s been in recent years,” says Philip Elwood, a Bay Area jazz critic who hosts a weekly jazz revue show on Berkeley public radio station KPFA.

“What you see now, in my opinion, is that we’re in sort of a semi-conservative mode in jazz,” says Tim Jackson, the Kuumbwa Jazz Center executive director who is taking over as general manager of the Monterey Jazz Festival this year. “People like the Harper Brothers, Roy Hargrove, Christopher Hollyday – a lot of those artists are really treading a fairly traditional path. “

As Jackson sees it, evidence of that conservatism can be seen in the artists now creating their own renditions of yesterday’s music: Saxist Scott Hamilton’s Big Band style, for example, or pianist Marcus Roberts’ tributes to Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington. 

What’s new on the jazz front is the blending of rhythms and melodies of music of artists like the Yellowjackets, Joe Zawinul, and Milton Nascimiento.

I think you’re going to see more of everything, just because the world is such that there is more and more people, and information is widely available,” says Jackson. “You’re going to see trends that are just all over the map.”

Not just more jazz traends, but more jazz music – that’s what Rob Rose, chairman of the Performance Studies department at the Berklee College of Music in Boston predicts for the future.

Berklee is world-renowned for its jazz education, and Rose says he thinks jazz has experienced a definite resurgence, partly due to the popularity of musicians like Wynton and Branford Marsalis, and partly because pop music isn’t offering much to adult listeners.

“Rock’s gotten real boring and the performing part’s gotten real boring,” says Rose. “At least, with jazz you know you’re going out and hearing real music by real performers. You can only look at people dancing on stage for so long. Jazz has sort of become an alternative music for people who are really tired with the way pop music is now.”

Like a lot of other people in business, Jackson believes predictions about the demise of jazz have been greatly exaggerated. 

“I think jazz will always have a very dedicated following,” says Jackson. “Lately, there’s been a lot of media response to jazz. If you look on television, you see John Coltrane’s name being invoked to sell Jeeps. Whether they think it’s because jazz reaches a sophisticated audience, I don’t know.But you do notice that it’s makig an impact on more of general culture. There is no doubt that the music will continue making a slow, steady climb upward.”

TIM’S TOP TEN

A list of Tim Jackson’s favorite jazz artists of all time:

1. John Coltrane
2. Miles Davis
3. Duke Ellington
4. Hubert Laws
5. Les McCann
6. Herbie Hancock
7. The Neville Brothers
8. Bobby Hutcherson
9. Kenny Barron
10. Michael Bloomfield