You’ve all heard the saying “free jazz.” Or maybe you’ve heard some discordant, hard-to-follow music in a seeming flurry of notes, and said, “Is this what they mean by ‘free jazz’?”

It is and it isn’t. Free Jazz was a genuine phenomenon in the music, spearheaded by players like Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Albert Alyer and Pharaoh Sanders, exemplified by John Coltrane’s “sheet of sound” technique as well as their own explorations into atonality and other breaks with the European music tradition.

Notably, one of the first “free jazz” breakthroughs consisted of Ornette Coleman on sax, Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, Billy Higgins on drums. That was the band for “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” Coleman’s 1959 debut album for Atlantic. (Do we have to remind you that both Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins both played at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival?)

Even today, many combos will sometimes still leap into the stratosphere and play outside the shackles of meter, structure, chords and even music out of pure exuberance. But as a “movement,” free jazz didn’t last long, evolving into avant-garde jazz. Part of the reason may be that it demands too much of an audience, limiting its popularity to a small core of aficionados.  

Then there’s the fact that jazz isn’t free. Everything comes with a cost, and for the jazz musician that cost may be years of training, putting material goods aside for the pursuit of musical perfection, reaching for inspiration while worrying about the bills.

Unfortunately, we have the same problem here at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. And we can’t deliver the same high-quality musical experience you’ve become used to without spending money. It’s not for fat salaries or luxury accommodations, either. Here’s a list of some of the expenses that we have to incur every time we put on the Festival, or any of our occasional “jazz masters” concerts or other special events:

Advertising… printing… mailing… design… website… grant writing… airfare and ground transportation… artist fees… venue rentals… sound systems… grand piano rental and movement… backline rental and delivery… signage… insurance… general operating costs… hotel accommodation… stage rental… event supplies… and much more, to say nothing of the education programs that are core to our mission at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival.

Fact of the matter is, public funding for the arts has plummeted in the past decade, and it was never great to begin with. Which leaves two main directions for an arts organization – corporate sponsorship, or private donations. (Remember, there’s a corporate sponsored festival in nearby Sonoma, so the alternative is closer than you might think.)

If you would like to keep the Healdsburg Jazz Festival our locally-supported celebration of an American art form, featuring living legends, local talents and up-and-coming stars of real jazz, then be part of the solution.

Jazz is not free… but it is tax-deductible. What does this mean for you? If you itemize your deductions for such common expenses as property tax, home mortgage interest, medical payments and the like, donations to our 501-C-3 arts organization can be fully deducted on your Schedule A. That means the more you donate, the less you will pay in taxes. Take a chance, donate enough and you can drop into a lower tax bracket!

If you donate any amount up to $250 per instance, you can just declare it. If you are generous enough to donate more, then the Healdsburg Jazz Festival owes you a receipt with our tax ID number, so you can document your generosity.

December is almost over, which means this is your last chance this year to put your money where you believe it can do good — to support the arts in your community. Please think about what makes life in Healdsburg worth living, and put your New Year’s resolution into effect today — make a donation to the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. It’s not free… but it is fully tax-deductible.

– ChristianKallen

Think you know what jazz is? Leave a comment on our page, “What Is Jazz?”

The ability to play jazz, to create spontaneous melodies and variations on a song’s structure and themes, is more than a talent – it’s a gift. Like any gift, it’s best when shared. And jazz musicians – standing on stage at Carnegie Hall or in a smoky basement club – share their gift with the audience, giving them the gift of their talent.

Sure, you can take music lessons to learn fingerings, notes and timing, scales and chords. All these are elements of any music, and an aptitude for playing – with an ear for music – is essential to success. Having good material helps, of course.

But for some musicians, it doesn’t necessarily matter what the musical milieu is, they can elevate the dross of today into dreams.

“It’s always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don’t know where it comes from, it’s just there and I don’t question it.”
—Miles Davis

Miles Davis isn’t the only musician to realize that talent comes from someplace other than music class or charts. As pianist Benny Green said, “Anybody can learn what Louis Armstrong knows about music in a few weeks. Nobody could learn to play like him in a thousand years.” It took more than red beans and rice for the New Orleans orphan to become a living legend, the first and greatest international ambassador of jazz.

No, we’re not going to get into “divine inspiration” when inspiration is enough, or talk about a God-given talent when it’s the gift that matters. How else do you explain the musicians who erupted out of nowhere and changed the music? Jazz isn’t real estate: If it was only about location, location, location, nobody would have ever heard of  Dave Brubeck (Stockton, Calif.), Dizzy Gillespie (Cheraw, South Carolina), or Billy Strayhorn (Hillsborough, North Carolina).

While most musicians must spend time learning the basics, some seem to spring fully-formed talents, prodigal. We can’t all be Mozart (who started writing tunes before he turned 5), but it is telling that not one but two recent guitar talents started showing their stuff in their teens, both in Sonoma County (Julian Lage and Kai Devitt-Lee). Surely they are gifted, if not as prodigiously as Mozart – and here’s the important part: Musicians like these make a gift of their gift, by sharing it with the audience.

 “Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given the world.” —the late Kansas City saxophonist Ahmad Alaadeen

We are the beneficiaries of the generosity of the giants. Nearly all musicians agree that it’s in performance that their talent is most fully expressed, and playing with others on stage is literally the heart and soul of jazz. Of course, there are exceptions: just as classical pianist Glen Gould eschewed the concert hall for decades, his jazz counterpart Bill Evans never seemed comfortable on stage, and preferred isolation over performance.

So when you hear a jazz performer or group, whether at the Dry Creek Kitchen on a Monday night or on stage at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival, or even the Kennedy Center, you’re enjoying the gift of jazz from the musicians for whom jazz is a gift… and sharing is their life’s calling.

Of course, when we think of gifts this time of year, many of us are thinking of the wrapped kind, CDs under the Xmas tree and gift certificates in our Christmas cards. Jazz has certainly given us some fine seasonal music – check out the All About Jazz list of the Top Ten Christmas jazz recordings of all time.

You’ll find Dexter Gordon’s “The Christmas Song,” Duke Ellington’s “Jingle Bells,” and even Charlie Parker doing “White Christmas.” Many jazz artists, like musicians in other disciplines, have made entire Christmas albums, including Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole.

There’s another kind of gift, too. The kind you can give when you donate to support the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. You’re making a gift not only to an organization (a non-profit organization, so your gift is tax deductible) but to the citizens and children of Sonoma county, whose lives will be enhanced by jazz in our schools and on our stages. It’s a gift to the future, too, to keep jazz a vital part of our musical landscape.

And like all gifts, it’s the giving that truly matters – like jazz musicians who share their gift on stage, you share your generosity with generations to come.

– Christian Kallen

Think you know what jazz is? Leave a comment on our page, “What Is Jazz?”

Just last week, James Moody left us. The saxophonist and flute player had a long career that spanned from the Army “Negro bands” in the Second World War to his recordings with the Blue Note label in 1948, his 1949 hit “Moody’s Mood for Love,” to his appearance in 2009 at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. In between he managed to squeeze in two influential stints with Dizzy Gillespie, acted in a Clint Eastwood movie, and even played in the Flamingo band for Las Vegas acts from Elvis Presley to Tina Turner, Lou Rawls to Liberace.

It was a full life, which ended when he chose against aggressive treatment for pancreatic cancer. But in a way it was a classic jazz life – learning the music in spite of difficult circumstances, adapting and prevailing, and in the end doing it his way.

Other jazz legends who have played in Healdsburg have since gone to meet their maker. Earlier this year Abbey Lincoln passed away; her independent creative voice headlined the 2003 festival. In 2007 bebop saxophonist Frank Morgan died just three years after his appearance in Healdsburg. And, perhaps most notably, we lost drummer Billy Higgins in 2001, after he helped launch the Healdsburg Jazz Festival in its first two years.

Then there’s Percy Heath, Jackie McLean, Harold Land — we’re not bringing up these names to scare you. Instead, we hope it’s an inspiration to recognize that we are fortunate that many of the jazz greats of the 20^th century have come to our town, thanks to the Healdsburg Jazz Festival.

The other side of the legends who have played in Healdsburg are the young talents who have been nurtured here, from guitarist Julian Lage whose first appearance in 2000 came when he was just 13 years old; to Noam Lemish, Taylor Eigsti and most recently Kai Devitt-Lee, like Lage another “local boy making good.” These are among the next generation of jazz stars. But they will not be the last.

For jazz is a continuum, from its inception over 100 years ago to its present manifestations around the world. It’s acolytes learning from masters, amateurs inspired by professionals, students sitting at the feet of mentors. It’s a tradition.

Jazz is ageless, in the same way that any musical tradition handed down across the generations is ageless. But it’s not a one-way street – the stage is level. You’ll find seniors giving tips to teens, and kids showing the old folks something new. You’ll find vibist emeritus Gary Burton picking Julian Lage to spearhead his “Generations” band, octogenarian Roy Haynes driving the beat while men half his age struggle to keep up.

Jazz is not just “traditional,” but everything a tradition should be – rich, inspirational, timeless. And like all forms of ageless art, it finds itself constantly renewed, recreated and resurrected by its own growth, assimilating new trends and techniques, tonalities and temperaments, into ever-evolving performance. That’s what jazz is. It’s all about the music.

Jazz is a lot of things, such as international, improvisational, diverse and creative. But there are also creative ways of helping jazz, as you’ll read in this posting.

Jazz fans have to become creative listeners. Like theater-goers, we enter into a state of suspended disbelief — we defer our expectations of where the song is going next, yet bear in mind its building blocks: chords, melody, themes, rhythms.

As you follow the thread of a musician’s solo, keep your ears open for how the other musicians support and enhance the improvisational thread, keep track of the song’s themes, and journey with the band into that orbit of extrapolation, that gravity-free zone of creativity. I like to say that jazz makes you smarter, and the only people who disagree are the ones who don’t understand what I’m saying.

Charles Mingus was highly creative -- as a bassist, composer, arranger and abstract artist.

Sure, you say, but all music is creative. To an extent that’s true, one has to be creative in some way to write or perform music. But jazz takes it a step further: creativity belongs in equal measure to the writer and the performer, and the ability to improvise is as highly regarded as a way with a tune. The listener is part of the equation too. It becomes like cubist art, and it’s no accident that jazz and abstract art were formed in the same few years.

Jazz builds on the structure and themes of popular and obscure, old and new songs to produce ever evolving improvisational takes – “spontaneous composition,”  as Billy Taylor told us. Which sounds like another way of saying “creative playing.”  More than any other music – more than rock, pop, and certainly classical – jazz is played by creative musicians, who are not only technically adept but soulfully engaged and personally expressive.

Creativity is at the core of jazz. Whether two or six musicians are playing, as the song evolves it changes with each performance, both from the first run-through to the finale, and every time it’s played. The bassist stays attuned to the soloist so he can emphasize or underscore the musical direction; the drummer punctuates the song’s structure in appropriate, emphatic and suggestive ways, as the pianist drops in color chords and notes to add to the audible tapestry.

You can see why jazz fans have to become creative listeners – it adds to the pleasure, completes the circle of creativity, when the performers and audience are on the same page. 

Jazz supporters have to be creative, too. If you love jazz – and I suspect you do, if you’re reading this post – then you have to find ways to feed your love. Find a good jazz show on the radio (we like “real jazz” with Doug Jayne on KRSH, and “jazz connections” with Larry Slater on KRCB, as well as the weekend jazz programming on KPFA and all the time on KCSM in San Mateo). If there’s a place nearby to see and hear live jazz, and go whenever you can – to the Hotel Healdsburg Lobby on Friday and Saturday nights, to the Dry Creek Kitchen on Mondays and Tuesdays, to special concerts and events throughout the year.

There are ways to become creative with your contributions, too. One woman told us she was asking not for gifts on her 60^th birthday party, but for donations to the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. You could do the same for anniversaries, or graduations, or almost any occasion when a gift is called for.

Another supporter is offering massage gift certificates at more than half off – the first 20 customers to call will receive a certificate for an hour-long “warm stone” massage for only $50, and she’ll contribute $200 to the Festival. Sound good? Send Kanti Pike an email at Warm Stone Therapeutic Massage or call her in Santa Rosa at 707-824-8843.

Exercise your creative potential  — donate through your own creative contributions. Bake sales? Progressive dinners? Raffles? Maybe you should head up to River Rock and donate half your winnings to the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. Or if you’re not feeling that creative — or lucky — just donate directly to the Healdsburg Jazz Festival.

Feed your love of jazz in creative ways, and it will reward you.

– Christian Kallen

Think you know what jazz is? Leave a comment on our page, “What Is Jazz?”

You’ve probably heard this before: Jazz is American music. Or, as the mission statement of the Healdsburg Jazz Festival puts it, “an indigenous American art form.” No, not “American” as in pine nut flour or Thanksgiving, but in the sense of an art that could only arise in the unique interaction of European and African cultures in the fertile ground of a New World.

But over the course of the past century, jazz has evolved and migrated outside any nation’s borders, and now transcends the globe. The music is played on nearly every continent (we’re not too sure about Antarctica, though they do have a rock band) and heard in a lexicon of languages, from Portuguese to Pidgin, Albanian to Zulu.

The migration of jazz began when it moved north from New Orleans toward Chicago, New York and other major cities. But it exploded beyond our borders with World War II, when jazz musicians were drafted or joined the armed forces and sent overseas. By 1945, the influence of jazz was especially strong in Europe, though the Django Reinhart-Stéphane Grappelli group Le Quintette du Hot Club de France had started over a decade earlier. In fact during the war jazz was regarded as a symbol of the resistance, “not because it was American but because it was a music created by blacks, and that was important when you were fighting against racist government [of Nazi Germany],” according to film director Bertrand Travernier.

Europe’s receptivity to jazz made it a natural haven for black American musicians who felt under-appreciated in their home country. Bud Powell, Lester Young, Don Cherry, Art Farmer and Dexter Gordon among others kept their careers alive in Europe, as did Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and Phil Woods. This became especially important in the 1950s and 1960s, when the onset of television and the growth of an American “pop culture” had little room for the improvisational creativity of jazz music.

Jazz is still alive and kickin’ it in Europe. Check out this video sent to us from a fan in Macedonia, featuring the Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko and his Quartet from 2004.

Japan and the Far East has also become receptive territory for jazz – again, perhaps as a result of U.S. occupation following the War. Pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi was picked up by Hampton Hawes in Yokohama in 1948, and she later became a widely recorded bop pianist and band leader.  Guitarist Koichi Yabori’s jazz fusion trio Fragile was active in the 1990s, and club DJs in Tokyo feature what they call “nu-jazz”

But what of Africa, the so-called birthplace of jazz? Randy Weston (who played at the 2009 Healdsburg Jazz Festival) has incorporated directly African elements since the 1960s, and he lived in Morocco for many years. He and other musicians have called upon Gwana musicians in their compositions and recordings.  Especially in South Africa, jazz has been part of the musical landscape in both pre- and post-apartheid eras, of which probably the best known group was the Jazz Epistles headed by trumpeter Hugh Masekela.

Here in Healdsburg, the loudest international voice is Latin American – witness the popularity of bossa nova, samba and other Latin jazz at many of our local venues, as well as the Rec Park open-air concerts in recent Healdsburg Jazz Festivals. Leny Andrade, Oscar Castro-Neves, Toninho Horta, Romero Lubambo and Airto are among the Brazilian musicians who have found a receptive audience in Healdsburg.

In truth, jazz knows no borders. Like the English language, it is an absorptive medium, growing by embracing. Who can deny that Zakir Hussein’s collaboration with Charles Lloyd is jazz? If there’s one thing jazz is, it’s international.

– Christian Kallen

Wynton Marsalis says jazz is what swings. Louis Armstrong said jazz was his idea of how a tune should go. Charlie Parker said it’s “happiness blues.”

Sure, jazz means different things to different people – check out the reader contributions to our page “What Is Jazz?” –  but it’s also a musical form with certain rules and expectations. As mentioned last time, improvisation is the common element in any jazz performance, the soloists’ extrapolation and “spontaneous composition” on the key, chords and melodies of a song.

When most people think of jazz, they think of the jazz combo – the trio, quartet, quintet or sometimes larger group that plays the music. Most people can probably even tell you what instruments are in a jazz band: drums, bass, a couple horns – saxophone, trumpet, sometimes trombone – and a piano.  These are the lessons of Operation Jazz Band, one of the education programs that the Healdsburg Jazz Festival has been producing for most of its 13-year life. These are the building blocks of jazz music.

So if jazz is improvisation, how do 3 or 4 or 5 people improvise? Well, in general, it’s the soloist who takes the lead in improvisation, when it’s his turn. For several choruses or run-throughs of a melody, the saxophonist (for instance) swings and honks and blisters his way through a shower of notes, then turns over the spotlight to someone else –  maybe another horn player or the pianist or, less frequently, the drummer or bassist. What these musicians do is to add their own interpretation of the song – and not just the song itself, but the song in how it’s being played that night, right now, in this instance.

When several musicians of improvisational training play together as a combo, they each apply their own musicianship and personalities to the performance, playing with and in counter-point to each other, creating a new “composition” – though it’s actually a performance, a take, or a set, an ad hoc moment of time. That’s jazz, too: the social and artistic interplay between musicians.

At some point, in pure jazz at least, all the musicians are “spontaneously composing” or recreating the number. It becomes a conversation, a group endeavor. It’s the same song, but it’s a song in the process of rediscovering itself by a particular group of musicians at that point in time. Or as Stan Kenton put it:

“A session in jazz,” said Kenton, “is comparable to an open forum where theories and opinions are discussed openly and freely. Without inhibition or the fear of being reprimanded, a soloist rises and speaks without the aid of notes or previous preparation. … One soloist will speak for himself on a chosen topic and then retire to hear the feelings of another on the same subject. On occasions, they will speak of happy things, then those of a more serious nature, sometimes somber and even tragic. All phases of life’s emotions are felt and experienced in jazz.”

So it’s not just improvisation that makes jazz, but the fertile environment for collective improvisation and personal expression that makes jazz what it is.  It’s pretty much been that way since the earliest years of the 20^th century, with the first Dixieland bands in New Orleans – think of the wild climax of many Dixieland tunes, with the instruments blaring out in new and competitive directions in a cacophony of braggadocio.

But jazz embraces much more than Dixieland, or the blues or the so-called Great American Songbook. The reason that jazz is constantly evolving, and changing, is built into its DNA, so to speak – it’s a living music that breathes, grows and changes with every instrumentalist or vocalist who joins in. So new songs, new techniques, new riffs, new rhythms, new directions are embraced in jazz as in few other forms of music. Its strength is its wide embrace.

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of jazz, too. You have some friends over for dinner, the food was good and the wine is better. Everyone’s getting along great, several conversations are going at once… and you suddenly become aware that everybody is saying something different, both unmoored from dialog yet still held together by a conversational thread. In that moment, everything seems to sail along of its own glorious momentum, and no matter what you say it’s in synch and right and rhymes… That’s when it becomes a real party, and that’s what jazz is: a party among musicians that the audience can enjoy.

In this week of Thanksgiving and the first wave of holiday obligation and reward, remember to value the healthy properties of a party: its social interactions, its feasting and imbibing, its ceremonial aspects. Remember and value most of all the jazz that we all seek and appreciate in our social world, our connectedness with the music of our friends, neighbors and family.

– Christian Kallen

Think you know what jazz is? Leave a comment on our page, “What Is Jazz?”

We’ve all had the experience – a jazz band is playing one of our favorites, “I Got Rhythm” or “My Favorite Things” or even “Moondance” – and halfway through the song we say, “Wait – what song is this again?” It’s taken off in an entirely new direction, and suddenly sounds nothing like Gershwin, or Van Morrison for that matter.

In part, that’s because that’s what Jazz Is: Improvisation. From its roots through its heyday and into the modern forms of the music, jazz has always taken the loose approach to melody, and its re-interpretations and spontaneous creative leaps are what makes it so unique in music. And what makes listening to masters like Charles Lloyd (right) so rewarding.

Other musics of the world do include improvisation in their expression – African drummers extrapolate on the rhythmic cycles, gamelan players create a tapestry of sounds on a pre-established melodic pattern. But jazz is unique in its emphasis on individual creativity – the soloist is practically a jazz invention, the guy (or gal) with the horn standing up and blowing his (or her) heart out in music.

But doesn’t that mean it’s all “made up”? Is there any order in the music that gives it shape, regardless of the soloist’s imagination and skill? Of course there is. Traditional jazz is improvisation on a song, and a song is composed of a structure, a melody based on chords played in measures.

This may sound, well, obvious, but it’s only obvious to musicians, who in turn can’t believe that everybody doesn’t “get it.” The chords of a song, and its melody, invariably provide the first run-through of a number on stage or in recording (called “the head”). Subsequent repeats of the song provide the opportunity for musicians to improvise on the melody though the chords that create the structure of the song itself (”playing the changes” in musician’s terms). The elegance or dissonance or success of a solo are rooted in how well, poorly or creatively the musician uses the constraints of the structure to express his individual message.

Among other topics, Billy Taylor defines improvisation in his “What Is Jazz” lectures at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (follow this link  for audio excerpts).  His definition: “Improvisation is spontaneous composition… based on the sense of form, content and language of the song.” In other words, to borrow a classical music term, a jazz performance might be thought of as “Variations on a Theme by Cole Porter,” or Harold Arlen, or Wayne Shorter or Miles Davis, or Joao Gilberto.

All of which makes the final chorus so gratifying – when the band returns from their musical journey and repeats the melody, changed and charged by spontaneous composition along the way, and reveal to us a familiar song made fresh by jazz.

– Christian Kallen

Think you know what jazz is? Leave a comment on our page, “What Is Jazz?”

Jazz is an important part of our national story, and how it’s often been music that has brought people together, in spite of their differences in race, gender, national origin and more. In essence, diversity is what the Healdsburg Jazz Festival stands for: promoting the “awareness and appreciation of jazz by facilitating cross-cultural interaction, providing performance opportunities, and educating young people and adults about the important role of jazz as an indigenous American art form.”

It’s a given that jazz arose out of the African-American experience, a merging of African rhythms and communal musical styles (call-and-response, group improvisation) into the European musical tradition of the 12-note scale. The Blues is this process simplified: a basic 12-bar, 3-chord structure, infused with syncopation and dissonance  in alternating vocal and instrumental passages.

Jazz, even more than the blues, has had a stronger impact on society’s integration than any other social force.  For instance, if the first superstar of jazz was Louis Armstrong, the second may have been Bix Beiderbecke, the white cornetist from Davenport, Iowa. Jazz is not just open-minded – it’s color-blind, in the best possible sense.

Jazz was an integration of equals decades before the movies, professional baseball, politics or Wall Street. Black musicians played with whites in Dixieland, hot jazz and on the bandstand; Benny Goodman’s historic 1938 Carnegie Hall concert featured many black musicians – Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton – sharing the spotlight with Goodman, Harry James and Gene Krupa.

The same holds true for the sexes. Women have long had a role in jazz as vocalists. Now they are taking up instruments, composition, and showing off their chops: Here in Healdsburg we’ve presented a number of these talented women, from Geri Allen (piano) to Esperanza Spalding (bass), Madeline Duran (saxophone) to Angela Wellman (trombone).

Even diverse sexual orientation has been tacitly accepted in jazz as in few other fields. Duke Ellington’s collaborator Billy Strayhorn made no secret of his preferences; today Gary Burton and Fred Hersch acknowledge their sexuality, but it doesn’t seem to affect their popularity.

Why is jazz so hospitable to diversity? Perhaps it’s because we all have music in our souls, and jazz is an expressive musical form that allows the individual to play with a group on a creative plane beyond social constraints. Stan Kenton expressed it well:

“Jazz is a distinct music that depends and thrives on individuality, and yet the individual is not oblivious to others, nor is he immune to their feelings… A session in jazz is comparable to an open forum where theories and opinions are discussed openly and freely.”

That’s what we hope the Healdsburg Jazz Festival provides, year round: an open forum for talent, for music, for jazz. It’s worth your support. Please donate now.

– Christian Kallen

Think you know what jazz is? Leave a comment on our page, “What Is Jazz?”

Nearly everyone agrees that jazz came from the African-American culture, most probably around New Orleans at the end of the 19th century. But did you know there’s also a connection to baseball — and Sonoma County — in the earliest reportage on jazz?

It’s universally recognized that jazz is America’s defining contribution to world music. In fact, even the US Congress noted this — in 1987, the 100th Congress passed a resolution designating jazz as “a rare and valuable national American treasure.” You can read the whole thing here.

First let’s get to the origins of jazz, as deriving from African rhythmic traditions involuntarily transplanted to the New World. In New Orleans, the black slave class had their musical instruments taken away from them by their masters, but they could still gather in what became known as Congo Square to beat out their rhythms and socialize.

As slavery was abolished, they returned to instrumental music, among other places in the somber graveyard procession at funerals. But it was the so-called “second line,” the return from the graveyard, that gave birth to jazz music. Here the musicians cut loose, and in all probability began to improvise on the hymns and popular songs of the day, creating a fun, festive and energetic parade to show that even after death the celebration of life could continue.

It was this unique combination of forces that could only happen in America — the celebration of freedom in the midst of slavery, and of life even in death — that gave birth to music that has since spread all around the world, but remains distinctly American: Jazz.

But baseball? Sonoma? However the music itself began, the question remains of where the word “Jazz” came from. The earliest printed usage of the word was. ironically, in the sports pages, when in 1912 a pitcher described his new wobbling curve as a “jazz ball.”

Just a year later a sportswriter from the San Francisco Bulletin, covering the Pacific Leage team the Seals, refered to “the jazz” as team enthusiasm or spark. He was reporting from Boyes Hot Springs, just outside the town of Sonoma, where the Seals had their training camp. (Don’t believe it? Trust Wikipedia!)

– Christian Kallen

Think you know what jazz is? Leave a comment on our page, “What Is Jazz?”

Summer’s coming to an end – with a heat wave, of course, after a cooler-than-usual year. It’s been an unusual season in a number of ways, especially at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. Normally, this is a quiet time of year for us, before the planning for the education programs and the annual summer Healdsburg Jazz Festival really gets going.

But this is not a normal year.

When people ask, How can I help the Festival get back on its feet? I tell them there are three simple steps you can take to get us moving again.

• Step up (donate)
• Sign up (volunteer)
• Show up (buy tickets)

Step Up to Donate: They say journey begins with a single step, and all it takes is the decision to help. Please help insure we have a 2011 Festival, and are able to continue building the reputation of Healdsburg as a jazz destination.

• New Options: Our Donate page can now accept recurring transactions. Which means if your enthusiasm exceeds your cash flow, you can set your own schedule in making tax deductible contributions to our non-profit organization.

Sign Up to Volunteer for HJF, and help solve our struggles actively. Join a devoted network of your fellow enthusiasts to keep the music alive in your home town. The meetings will focus on creating ways to bring in income for the Festival by doing fundraisers, working with wineries, and other new ideas.

Committees will be forming to work on different projects. We need lots of help and hope everyone is charged up and ready to pitch in! Please join us at the upcoming Volunteer Meetings:

• Wednesday October 6, 6:30 – 8 PM. Meeting will be held in our usual spot, upstairs at the Alliance Medical Center, 1341 University St. tucked in behind the Healdsburg Hospital. (The best entrance for parking is off Prentice Street.)
• Wednesday November 10, 6:30 – 8 PM. Same location, at the Alliance Medical Center. If you go to the first meeting you can share your ideas and progress here. But newcomers are always welcome – there’s always something to do!

Show Up! One of the most popular ideas for the Healdsburg Jazz Festival – in fact the reason we exist – is to bring the living, breathing creative energy of jazz alive in performance. And it deserves your support.

We are arranging to have several fundraising events featuring some of the musicians who lent their names to our efforts to Save the Healdsburg Jazz Festival. These performances are the most enjoyable way to show your support, so buy your tickets to Healdsburg Jazz Festival events.

Just don’t forget to Step Up and Sign Up before you Show Up!

Jessica Felix