SHO, Marsalis light up Bellevue

Dominating tenor saxophonist Branford Marsalis and the infectious Spanish Harlem Orchestra — both Grammy winners — headline the much-anticipated revival of the Bellevue Jazz Festival this weekend.

The celebration officially started April 9 with a weekly series of regional acts and features more of the same this weekend — including Randy Halberstadt, Dave Peterson, the Seattle Repertory Jazz Quartet and Greta Matassa — in various venues.

Bellevue has had an on-again-off-again love affair with jazz. Starting in 1978, the city sponsored an excellent festival featuring regional musicians, but after 1993, it pulled the plug.

Enter Leslie Lloyd, president of the Bellevue Downtown Association (BDA) and, not coincidentally, daughter of banjo man Barry Durkee, who founded the Puget Sound Traditional Jazz Society.

"We looked at a food festival, a sporting event and some sort of music festival," said Lloyd, who is starting small but plans to expand the festival. "Our experience with jazz over the last seven years showed us it's a good fit for Bellevue."

The BDA has produced a successful annual series of six free Wednesday-night jazz concerts.

The association's mission also includes creating goodwill. It has certainly done that with its magnanimous offer of free tickets (to Marsalis' concert tonight at Meydenbauer Center) for school bands that played the Essentially Ellington competition in New York last week.

Inspired by the model of the Portland Jazz Festival (PDX), Lloyd also hopes to fill Bellevue hotel rooms. She even hired PDX fest artistic director Bill Royston to book her national artists.

"Putting heads in beds and promoting Bellevue — that's part of our mission," she said. "There is a large audience of fans that will travel for jazz."

So far, the jury is out. No hotel stats are available, but Bellevue has sold about 400 tickets for Marsalis and fewer than 200 for the Spanish Harlem Orchestra (SHO). It doesn't help that the Folklife Festival also takes place this weekend (see stories on Pages 3-5), as well as the Edmonds Jazz Connection.

It would be a shame if no one came out for the SHO Saturday. It's a terrific outfit and it's playing in a dance-friendly hall, the downstairs ballroom of the Meydenbauer Center.

A revival band of '70s "Nuyorican" salsa, since its start in 2000, the band has flourished beyond the wildest dreams of its artistic director, Oscar Hernández.

The 13-piece band won a Grammy for its second album, "Across 110th Street," and its current disc, "United We Swing," has received well-deserved strong notices. SHO tours constantly, worldwide.

"It's been an incredible ride," said the Bronx-born Hernández, in a phone interview from his Los Angeles home. "The essence of this music has been lost the last 15 years. We brought it back to the forefront and people suddenly heard what they'd been missing. All the musicians in the band have played with everybody over the last 30 years — Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Machito, Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto. It's a gift, to be able to play music like I want to play it, all over the world."

SHO plays traditional hits, such as "Ahora Si" and "Soy Candela," but Hernández, a crackerjack pianist, rearranges them and writes new tunes as well. For inspiration, he often reaches back to the Cuban roots of salsa, to bandleaders like Beny Moré and Arsenio Rodríguez.

At its mesmerizing show in February at the Portland Jazz Festival, the band moved with power and elegance through cha-chas, mambos, sones and guaguancos. The horns played with crisp precision and soloists were vigorous. The band's vocal trio — Ray De La Paz, Marco Bermudez and Willie Torres — sang passionate boleros as well as lickety-split call-and-response patterns, all the while doing steps.

"It's old-school," said Hernández, "but we find ways to stretch it and keep it fresh."

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com