Jazz takes a giant leap with Bellevue Jazz Festival

When Cooksie Kramer, a music teacher, longtime jazz fan and promoter, first envisioned presenting jazz in her hometown of Bellevue more than a decade ago, the idea seemed daunting and faraway.

Live jazz music was lightly scattered on the Eastside, so most drove into Seattle to hear it. Several years ago, Kramer and her husband, Lionel, began hosting the Eastside Jazz Club, a series of jazz performances held in the showroom of the Sherman Clay piano store on Bellevue Way. Shows were infrequent, one or two per month, but artists got to play a Steinway concert grand.

"It's getting better here," said Cooksie Kramer. "For a while, there was nothing, then you had a couple of restaurants trying very hard. It's baby steps and it takes a while."

This weekend, jazz will take a relative leap on the Eastside when the Bellevue Jazz Festival opens this afternoon for three days of free and ticketed events in downtown Bellevue.

The festival, in its second year in its current form, is a much larger event than the original festival, which started in 1978 at Bellevue Community College. The music will be presented in formal performance spaces and upscale restaurants and bars that did not exist 20 years ago. And nationally recognized musicians, like singer Dianne Reeves and the Mingus Big Band, are the festival's headliners.

The national acts are one of what festival director Leslie Lloyd referred to as the "three pillars" of the event. The second pillar is the 10 local musicians performing in various downtown restaurants, none of which are charging admission. The third pillar is the student combos from various high schools which will perform throughout the festival. The elite among them, part of the festival's Rising Stars program, will perform with the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra to close the festival Sunday evening. Various local musicians will also host two open jam sessions tonight and Saturday night.

Reeves and the Mingus band will perform in the Meydenbauer Center Hall tonight and Saturday night respectively. The other national acts — vocalists Kurt Elling, Mose Allison and Patricia Barber, and pianist Danilo Perez — will perform in the Theater at Meydenbauer Center. Ticket prices for the Meydenbauer shows start at $20, with an all-access pass (admission to all the headline acts) going for $199.

The scale of the Bellevue Jazz Festival, which aims to become as big as the Portland and San Francisco jazz festivals, makes it a gamble, particularly during the recession. Jazz music has never been easy to monetize. The Portland Jazz Festival was canceled last year before Alaska Airlines came to the rescue with a corporate sponsorship that saved the event. Corporate dollars are a necessary reality for large, commercial jazz festivals.

Seattle's Earshot festival relies mostly on public funding and grant money. It also does not have to come up with the kind of payroll demanded by the likes of Reeves or last year's headliner, Branford Marsalis. The Ballard Jazz Festival relies mostly on the sponsorship of local businesses and features mostly local musicians. The Bellevue Jazz Festival receives both private corporate dollars (Microsoft) and public funding from the city of Bellevue and King County and its arts funding arm, 4Culture.

"We never kidded ourselves that we were going to make money," Lloyd said. "We learned a ton last year and have gotten a lot smarter. ... We learned how to better spend marketing dollars. We negotiated better prices for talent. All those things add up. No question it's a risk, but anything we do is a risk. This is part of the growth and evolution of downtown Bellevue."

The festival is also an investment in the civic pride of Bellevue, a city that is a center of rapid growth and ripe for an identity of its own. BJF is most comparable to the Jazz Port Townsend festival, which also features national artists, local musicians and a student-education component.

That student group, The Rising Stars, are 18 hand-picked high-school musicians who were nominated by their band directors and auditioned before Michael Brockman, a founding member of the SRJO and an instructor at the University of Washington, among others. The three area bands who went to the Essentially Ellington competition earlier this month, Garfield, Roosevelt and Newport, all have musicians in that elite 18. Their inclusion in the festival is both a nod to the exceptional, school-age talent in the region and a way of giving the community a stake in the event.

For the local musicians, it's a welcome and, sadly, somewhat rare opportunity to play a gig on the Eastside. Drummer Jose Gonzales and his trio play the Grand Cru Wine Bar this afternoon; bassist Jon Hamar plays the Vertigo Lounge with his trio later this evening; and singer Greta Matassa will perform in the Sherman Clay store early Saturday evening.

"We're happy these guys can get some work," said Cooksie Kramer, who is on the festival's advisory board and was responsible for booking most of the local musicians in the event. "One of the musicians we know had three gigs canceled in the last couple of weeks. It's the sign of the times, no question about it. It's tough at the moment."

Hugo Kugiya: hlugiya@yahoo.com

In this story, originally published May 22, 2009, the Jose Gonzalez Trio was listed as playing Saturday, May 23 instead of Friday, May 22.