This July, Litchfield Jazz Festival marks a Quarter Century from the sound stages of Telefunken Electroakustik in South Windsor CT. In this go-with-the-flow summer, and on this landmark year for Connecticut’s premier jazz fest, a world-wide audience is expected. “Sets will be live and the audience will be live. Just not in the same room. Can’t always have what you want,” jokes the fest founder Vita Muir. The Litchfield Jazz Festival will live streamed, and it will be free.
The choice of sets, Muir says, was inspired by iconic musicians who mark a full Century in 2020. This year’s Litchfield Jazz Festival salutes two of these: Charlie Parker and Art Blakey.
“While it would have been sweet to do “Bird, Brubeck and Blakey,” she notes, “we had to pass since we jumped the gun and saluted our dear friend Dave Brubeck in 2018. Anyway, Parker and Blakey are an embarrassment of riches all on their own, and we are proud to salute them both.”
The Festival is hosted by alto saxophonist Kris Allen. Allen is a long-time Litchfield Jazz Camp faculty member and will appear at this year’s fest as leader of the Charlie Parker tribute.
Schedule of Events
Litchfield Legends in the Making
Opening this anniversary festival is rising star vocalist Nicole Zuraitis and her Litchfield Jazz Band. A 2019 Grammy Nominee, Nicole, and her proteges, Melinda Rodriguez and Anson Jones will be backed by a piano trio featuring 14-year-old pianist Bandon Goldberg, bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Dan Pugash. Brandon has played clubs in New York and around the country with his trio since he began attending LJC at age 10. His first album released in 2019 won a 4-star rating from Down Beat. Luques, a long-time member of Eddie Palmieri’s band, joined LJC at 12. Anson, now 21 and already a working musician, is a Princeton undergrad who also joined LJC at 12. Melinda joined four years ago as a teaching assistant to Ms. Zuraitis and is now a faculty member. A newly minted Masters scholar, she was a 2020 finalist in the TV show THE VOICE. Zuraitis, along with her Grammy -Nominated husband, drummer Dan Pugash, tours the US and Asia with the Dan Pugash Nonet Plus 1. She is a prize-winning recording artist, singer/ songwriter, and pianist performing solo and in various ensembles worldwide. She has been a member of the Litchfield Jazz Family since she appeared on our doorstep with her trombone at age 12 in 1997, the year we began. She now heads our vocal programs and is helping raise the next jazz generation.
Charlie Parker Centennial Tribute
with Kris Allen on alto sax, , Bruce Harris, trumpet, Jen Allen, piano, Zwe Duma Bell Le Pere, bass, and Jonathan Barber, drums.
“To say that Charlie “Yardbird” Parker was one of the greatest jazz musicians who ever lived is a bit like saying the Mona Lisa is a well-known painting” (J. D. Cosidine, DownBeat). Parker was just 34 when he died in 1955 of a heart attack in the suite of his friend and patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter at the Stanhope Hotel in New York City while watching The Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show on television. The establishment took little notice, so an army of jazz lovers plastered every available wall in New York with the phrase “Bird Lives.” And he still does.
As an overconfident teenaged alto player, he was laughed off the stage at his first professional gig for his less-than-professional time. Undaunted, he set out to practice 15 hours a day for the next 4 years. He mastered his instrument but, sadly simultaneously developed a drug habit that ultimately led to his death and an unresolvable argument about whether his playing was so extraordinary because of or in spite of it. Still, thanks to an abundance of teaching tools based on transcriptions of his work, students today have a firm handle on bebop, a genre he virtually invented. Now urged to really listen to this master, contemporary players have caused the music to evolve through Parker and to the beyond. Parker himself once told DownBeat Magazine, “They teach you there’s a boundary line to music, but, man, there’s no boundary line to art.”
Art Blakey Centennial Tribute
Art Blakey built more than a band in 1955. He built an institution that thrived for 35 years. The first iteration, co-led by Blakey and pianist Horace Silver, included trumpeter Kenny Dorham, bassist Doug Watkins and tenor saxophonist, Hank Mobley. While its members varied – they included at one time or another, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, Freddie Hubbard, Valery Ponomarev, Reggie Workman and others –their ranks always included the best of the “young lions.” Wynton Marsalis, Benny Green, Terence Blanchard and others were teen agers when they came on-board. Bassist Reggie Workman said of Blakey, “He kept that institution together and created a structure that enabled many of the young players who came along to find themselves in the music business.”
Our Art Blakey Tribute is directed by Valery Ponomarev who appeared on many Messenger albums in the late ‘70s and leads a big band homage he calls Our Father Who Art Blakey. For today, we will return to the smaller unit Blakey used. Bandmembers include; Valery Ponomarev (leader), trumpet, Don Braden, sax, Victor Jones, drums, Kevin Eubanks, trombone, Lonnie Plaxico, bass and Zaccai Curtis, piano
Artist Talks
Stay tuned for more details about how to tune in for Free on July 25!