Festival Review | At Bellevue Jazz Fest, fine music overcomes settings

Festival Review |

Audiences obliged the second Bellevue Jazz Festival, showing up in respectable and consistent numbers over Memorial Day weekend in venues large and small — making an encouraging case for the state of jazz patronage on the Eastside and in Greater Seattle.

Designed to be a big, high impact, civic ritual befitting a burgeoning metropolis, the three-day Bellevue Jazz Festival met its intentions on an important front, delivering an impressive density of jazz performances and the crowds expected of a large-scale event.

Friday's headliner Dianne Reeves, a widely celebrated singer with the celebrity heft and the hardware (four Grammy Awards) to carry a big-money jazz festival, performed with just two guitarists, Russell Malone on electric guitar, Romero Lubambo on acoustic, providing a new context to a voice that is as pure and pitch-perfect as they come.

Saturday night, the festival featured the Mingus Big Band, musician for musician one of the most spirited and technically gifted bands in the country. The event closed Sunday night with a nod to the local talent as the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, an all-star big band made up of Seattle's top musicians, performed Count Basie's Kansas City Suite to perfection.

Three sextets made up of the area's most talented high school musicians opened for the SRJO as part of the festival's jazz-education component. Other student combos played through the weekend at the Bellevue Arts Museum.

In general, the festival's top end (the national artists) and bottom end (students) were well showcased. It was the middle — the local professional musicians — who might have been underutilized; it is their fan base, after all, that serves as the backbone audience for all jazz in the region.

The festival is on a three-year mission to become a viable event. As an investment in the cultural life of Bellevue, it also has to deliver returns and cover a budget that climbs well into the five figures just to pay the artists. The concerts in the Meydenbauer Center consistently drew audiences in the range of 400 to 600 people; Seattle singer Greta Matassa's quartet filled the showroom of the Sherman Clay piano store; the late-night jam sessions at the Courtyard by Marriott hotel also drew healthy crowds who were treated to appearances by several members of the Mingus band as well as Lubambo and Malone.

If anything held back the festival, it was its physical surroundings. Downtown Bellevue, like many new cities, was built for cars and commerce, with wide streets and long blocks intimidating to pedestrians. New construction of high-rises frequently cut off sidewalks. Although a handful of venues were clustered conveniently along Bellevue Way, others (including Meydenbauer) were scattered over some 20 square blocks, too far for a comfortable walk. Essentially, the festival's interface did not measure up to the content.

Meydenbauer is not a pure performance hall, but a mixed-use facility. The theater, where most of the performances were held, is a comfortable if austere room. But the Center Hall, where Reeves and the Mingus band performed, was designed to house large conventions and banquets (like the alumni meeting of a college sorority in there on the jazz festival's final night).

The open jam sessions were similarly held in a hotel meeting room set up with tables and chairs. Musicians reported it an improvement from last year, when the sessions were held in a noisy bar.

The smaller venues were a mix of bars and restaurants, some more intimate than others. Singer Trish Hatley's shows at El Gaucho got a bit lost in the cacophony of the vast dining room. Trumpeter Thomas Marriott performed Saturday with his trio in a bar off the lobby of the Westin, a beautiful room of suitable scale with large doors that opened to a pedestrian walkway. But he had to contend with the noise coming from the lobby and the walkway used by shoppers at Bellevue Square.

Other musicians had to settle for more prosaic spaces: Pianist Bill Anschell had to bring his own electric keyboard to play the bar at the Sheraton Hotel; guitarist Dave Peterson's trio performed in the loft at the Rock Bottom Brewery & Restaurant next to the pool table and projection TV. In each case the music overcame the setting.

Hugo Kugiya: hkugiya@yahoo.com