Fred Hersch©Andrea Canter

The tenth annual Healdsburg Jazz Festival was my third. And it won’t be my last. Amidst the wineries, bike trails, rolling hills and galleries of Sonoma County, Jessica Felix and company have been putting on one of the nation’s finest, if one of the least hyped, jazz festivals. For the tenth anniversary, many past performers returned, a cast as compelling as any at Monterrey, Montreal, or Montreux. The second weekend boasted the likes of Cedar Walton, Billy Hart, Joshua Redman, Bobby Hutcherson, Charlie Haden, Kenny Barron and Bobby Watson. Not able to spend ten days in such surroundings, I opted for the first weekend (May 30-31), featuring the Charles Lloyd Quartet/Trio and, most intriguing, the Fred Hersch Trio with Kurt Ellling. 

I don’t remember when I first became a true believer in the art of Fred Hersch. He’s the “pianists’ pianist,” a mentor and teacher to many of today’s most accomplished artists while his own performance chops are often overlooked by general audiences even if highly acclaimed by critics. A master of nuance, an oblique interpreter, and inventive composer, Fred has particularly worked creatively with vocalists. His setting of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was his first collaboration with vocalist nonpareil Kurt Elling, an interaction delightfully reprised this night in Santa Rosa. Elling, in addition to his physical control and emotional power, has vaulted to the top of the kingdom of jazz singers, his generation’s answer to Jon Hendricks and Mark Murphy, an inventive interpreter and lyricist who has given new life to not only Walt Whitman but to such diverse works as “Body and Soul” and John Coltrane’s “Resolution.” I’ve seen Hersch at Jazz Standard in Manhattan, the Artists Quarter and Orchestra Hall in the Twin Cities; Elling at Birdland and back home at the Dakota in Minneapolis. To see them together, I didn’t question my choice to attend the festival’s first weekend.  

Jazz on the Pentacrest: The Geoff Keezer Trio at the 2006 ICJF (Andrea Canter)

Nostalgia might have prompted my first trip to my hometown jazz festival in Iowa City, but the quality of the music and organization bring me back. Within a day’s drive of the Twin Cities (about 5 hours south), Chicago, Omaha and St. Louis, the Iowa City Jazz Festival has deservedly earned its “top ten” reputation among free public festivals nationwide. Beyond three stages boasting the best in national, local and student musicians, the ICJF supplies the classiest “street food” in mid-America, and the sum total is one hot holiday weekend, July 4-6.  

The 18th Toyota Scion Iowa City Jazz Festival is now a component of the Iowa City Summer of the Arts; long-time festival director and guitarist Steve Grismore remains on the scene as festival coordinator. Summer of the Arts brings several big events under one umbrella and calls attention to Iowa City as the cultural mecca it has become, featuring music, dance, theater and creative arts of all sorts throughout the summer (and, in fact, all year long). But the biggest draw to this college community in eastern Iowa is the jazz festival, bringing an average of 25,000 each summer to the heart of downtown and the University of Iowa campus. Now held on the partially shaded lawn of the famed Pentacrest (the center of the U of I administration anchored by “Old Capitol”—Iowa’s first statehouse), the festival has grown from a one-day local showcase in 1991 to a three-night/two-day jazz menagerie combining the highest level of international touring artists with local, college and high school bands, late night jams at the Sheraton Hotel, radio interviews, school clinics, and more.