Festival review | Oscar Peterson tribute highlights Jazz Port Townsend

Festival Review |

PORT TOWNSEND — Young faces and new names dominated Jazz Port Townsend this year, emerging talent that pressed audiences against the future of jazz. But as the three-day festival neared its peak Saturday afternoon, the audience was asked to look to the past.

The festival's artistic director John Clayton took the lead, recalling for those who packed McCurdy Pavilion in Fort Worden State Park, the first time, at age 16, that he ever listened to a recording of pianist Oscar Peterson. Like most, he was astounded and he never looked at jazz music the same way again. He remembered "every note," Clayton said.

And with that, Clayton introduced to the stage the pianist Peterson named as his protégé, Benny Green, who had agreed, for the first time since Peterson's death in 2007, to perform a set of Peterson's music as a tribute to his former mentor.

Clayton himself was mentored by Peterson's longtime bass player, Ray Brown, who also made Green part of his own trio in the early 1990s. Before Green sat down at the piano, Clayton made a phone call to Peterson's widow, Kelly Peterson, from the stage so she could hear the audience applaud.

Green, 46, who performed with Seattle bassist Doug Miller and drummer Alvester Garnett, is one of few — if not the only pianist — who not only understands Peterson but can play like him. Capturing Peterson's sound means taking command of the entire keyboard in a way few have done, doubling up his lines of improvisation with his right and left hand, filling songs with stout chords and bluesy turns, swallowing whale gulps of notes at a time but pronouncing each one meaningfully.

The trio took one departure from playing Peterson's original compositions, with a mercurial version of the theme from the television show "Bewitched," a song Green counted off at close to 400 beats per minute. Velocity was another Peterson trademark.

Between songs, Green spoke eloquently about his close friendship with Peterson and shared a particular personal observation: "He was the only musician I know who smiled when he listened to a recording of himself."

The Peterson tribute was the second of three Saturday-afternoon concerts on the main stage. The other sets represented attempts to go beyond traditional combinations of instruments to achieve a unique collective sound. A quintet of three guitars, dubbed "22 strings and skins," featured Dan Balmer Bruce Forman and Graham Dechter on guitar and Chuck Deardorf on bass. "Skins" referred to drummer Greg Williamson. The group led the audience on a sort of historical tour of jazz guitar, adapting songs made famous by Charlie Christian, Freddy Green, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery. Green's set was followed by the "brass attack," a trombone octet featuring trombonists Wycliffe Gordon, Andre Hayward, Roland Barber, Dave Marriott and Dan Marcus.

When it comes to combos, Clayton prefers the extremes, either small and intimate or large and powerful.

"I love the really big things and the really small things," he said before the show. The point of a large group is the spectacle of sound, full and impenetrable. The nakedness of the small group brings an audience exceptionally close to the improvisational process. The festival featured plenty of either.

But the story of festival was its youth; many of the performers are recent graduates of music conservatories and winners of prestigious awards. Headliners like Dechter, singer Gretchen Parlato, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, drummer Obed Calvaire, bassist Joe Sanders and pianist Taylor Eigsti are all in their 20s. They played both with one another and with musicians old enough to be their parents.

Or with an actual parent, as in Saturday's closing concert at McCurdy, when 25-year-old pianist Gerald Clayton played with his father, John Clayton, and his uncle, Jeff Clayton. Gerald attended music school at USC, where his father is an instructor. The inclusion of the country's most talented young musicians in the festival is an imprint of the its director.

Clayton, said Centrum's executive director John MacElwee, "has his hand on the pulse of young jazz talent."

Hugo Kuguya: hkugiya@yahoo.com