When the Great River Jazz Fest started 25 years ago, it catered to a certain kind of music fan, one who is generally older than your average Second Supper reader. Originally dubbed the Great River Traditional Jazz Festival, the inaugural runs featured only Dixieland bands, which were a far cry from the fusion acts that dominated the contemporary jazz scene.
But just as jazz performance evolved from clarinets and straw hats to electric instruments and rock rhythms, the Great River Jazz Fest, which will be held next weekend at Riverside Park, the La Crosse Center and other late-night jam spots, also evolved to keep up with changing times.
Terry Rochester, a local jazz enthusiast who hosts a weekly radio show on 88.9 WLSU, is the president and director of this year’s fest. A retiree with a trough full of jazz stories, Rochester has been involved with the festival from the start and seems committed to bringing his favorite kind of music to younger ears.
When he was first named festival president over two decades ago, Rochester said one of his first executive acts was to remove the word “Traditional” from the name. Dixieland is a fine style of music that was integral to the development of modern jazz, but the genre has come a long way since Dixieland’s heyday in the 1910s and ’20s.
Besides the narrow musical scope, fans of Dixieland jazz tend to be in the older age demographic. By opening up the Great River festival to other styles of jazz music, Rochester said he hoped to attract more young people to the shows, a booking philosophy that continues into its 25th year.
“We’ve got big bands. We’ve got small groups, large groups and one of the best singers I’ve ever heard live; that’s Debbie Duncan,” Rochester said in an interview this week, squeezed into a busy day of festival preparations.
The 25th Great River Jazz Festival, which will be held Aug. 5-8, features 11 groups from around the country. As a nod to its silver anniversary, most of the lineup has performed at previous Great River Jazz Fests, which spent its first 21 years centered at the southside Oktoberfest grounds and will return to the outdoors next week after a three-year run exclusively in the La Crosse Center.
On a sadder note, this year’s festival is also held partially in memorial to three jazz musicians and GRJF alumni who passed away in 2010: pianist Eddie Higgins, clarinetist
Chuck Hedges and cornet player Tom Saunders.
Higgins, whom Rochester called “one of the best mainstream jazz piano players that I ever knew,” was a Chicago native who performed at the GRJF several times. This year, the Great River All Stars, a festival tradition comprised of top players from around the country, will perform three sets in Higgins’ memory.
“It’s not a soundalike band. It’s not a tribute band. It’s just in memory of him, music that he would like to hear,” Rochester explained.
Hedges, who was from Milwaukee, was previously booked to play this year’s festival, but he had to cancel due to his declining health. “He called and said ‘My doctor said I won’t be here in August.’ And damned if he wasn’t right,” Rochester recalled with a mournful smile.
To honor Hedges, Rochester booked the John Paulson Group, a local trio led by the jazz director of St. Mary’s University, which has similar instrumentation to the many groups Hedges would bring to town.
The legacy of Tom Saunders, a Dixieland impresario, will be continued by local favorites Al Townsend — a fellow cornet player — and his Wonderful World Jazz Band.
The GRJF opens with a “Taster Session” on Thursday, Aug. 5, and lasts through an afternoon show on Sunday, Aug. 8. Most of the scheduled sets will take place either at the lower level of the La Crosse Center or, for the first time, under a tent at Riverside Park.
“We’ve had a lot of people say ‘Jeez, it’s August; we want to be outside,’” said Rochester, referencing the previous three GRJFs, which were held only inside the center.
Tickets to individual sessions, which last either three and a half hours on Friday and Saturday nights or nine hours on Saturday morning and afternoon, are $19 in advance or $21 at the gate. (Student tickets are $8 per session.) An individual ticket earns access to both the Riverside Park and La Crosse Center shows, though the festival also sells a $109 all-events badge and a $129 VIP badge that gains access to all Jazz Fest events, including a Meet the Musicians reception.
An annual festival highlight will be the Great River All Stars, which will feature improvisational sets from crack jazz musicians from around the country. Other established acts include Sam Miltich & Clearwater Hot Club, who will honor the 100th anniversary of Django Reinhardt’s birth with a set of gypsy jazz; Debbie Duncan with the Mary Louise Knutson Trio, which features one of the nation’s premier jazz vocalists; and the Kansas City septet AfterGroove, which will perform a polished set of contemporary (aka “smooth”) jazz.
“We feel that with the younger types of jazz that we’ve got and the smooth jazz, the majority of that audience is probably under 45,” Rochester said.
Both evening sessions feature a total of eight acts, which will be followed by late-night jam sessions at the Freight House, 107 Vine St., and another local venue that Rochester couldn’t confirm this week.
There will also be a “Mardi Gras Parade” beginning at 6 p.m. on Friday outside the La Crosse Center, outdoor shows on Saturday morning at the corner of Third and Main streets, and a PianoRama at the Pump House, 119 King St., on Saturday morning where every piano player at the festival will perform a 40-minute solo set.
“There’s a lot of places that jazz has gone. It’s come through swing and post-bop and all those patterns, and now it’s kind of like whatever you want to do,” Rochester said. “That’s what makes jazz fun for me, that everybody does it differently and I won’t hear the same song played twice.” |
