That’s the thing about jazz players. They live in houses and apartments. They wear shirts. They get haircuts and search in vain for notaries on the weekends. They have their brake pads replaced. They eat legumes. They put off treatment for plantar warts but eventually the pain gets too much. They don’t update their iOS on the regular and they don’t always sleep well. They are among us. But they are not us.
Or so I came to believe as a young person. A child of the ‘60s and ‘70s in a musical family, I grew up with an intimidated reverence for jazz players, an across-the-board assumption that they all carried cards and knew something special, a high magic: part science, part enlightenment and liberation, part cult cabalism and secret handshakes.
Such reverence was not undue. Jazz is, after all, America’s chief original contribution to 20th century serious music, for a time the envy of the world. Most of all, jazz is living, breathing testimony to the boundless genius of African American culture, the highest art cultivated under the heaviest resistance. White (and Asian, and South American) jazz geniuses abound, but jazz itself is a black property. And in my household, Bill Evans and Teddy Wilson (my father’s favorites) as well as Keith Jarrett and Jim Hall (my brother’s favorites) were super beings. Berklee was Hogwarts.
It would take a long time for jazz to become humanized to me, to settle into its place as “just another” high music tradition with its own conventions and its own blinders. Furthermore, it would take me a while to recognize the quotidian and functional nature of this music, here on the ground. Even though jazz is challenging music that can be unrewarding to listeners who haven’t put in their hours, communities — all of them — have jazz needs and jazz providers.
And that’s a lovely thing about The Hudson Valley Jazz Festival, now in its 14th season. As opposed to a monolithic jazz fest like Newport or Montreaux, the HVJF is more like the outlandishly vibrant Montreal Jazz Festival in miniature: community-situated, more than a dozen concerts over a long weekend distributed in venues across the region in a way that highlights the two poles of jazz excellence in the valley: Woodstock and environs to the north, Orange County to the south.
Certainly, Woodstock has long been the main stop on the regional jazz history tour. How could it be otherwise? This is where the jazz visionary Jack DeJohnette has lived for decades and where he, Dave Holland, and the late John Abercrombie made their remarkable music as the Gateway Trio. This (well, Saugerties) is where the titanic Sonny Rollins fell off the rocks, broke his ankle, and finished the set anyway. So it is fitting that the Bearsville Theater, a venue with generous bandwidth for fusion and other virtuoso genres, is the site of one the festival keynote concerts, guitarist Stanley Jordan on Saturday, August 20 at 7p.m. The artist himself is an interesting study in jazz self-actualization. Famous at first for the novelty of his two-hand tapping technique, Jordan, like Bobby McFerrin, made the perilous journey from novelty/prodigy to mature artist, a voyage that doesn’t always end happily.
Less known, even around here, is the jazz vibrancy of Orange County, a neighborhood that lacks the great 20th century art narrative that Woodstock possesses but that has, in recent decades, seen a blooming of jazz and an increasing population of resident heavy players, headlined, perhaps, by the marquee name of Joe Lovano, one of the leading tenor saxophonists of the last half century. Eyeballing the schedule of events, it is not completely outrageous to say that the Hudson Valley Jazz Festival is predominantly though hardly exclusively an Orange County thing. The festival’s other keynote concert features the inventive fusion and funk guitarist Oz Noy performing in a free event on the Warwick village green on Saturday, August 20 at 7:30 p.m.
Other venues presenting HVJF events include clubs, galleries, libraries and theaters in Warwick, Port Jervis, Greenwood Lake, Port Chester, Sugar Loaf, New Paltz, and Kingston. A few interesting omissions may or may not speak to the fractiousness that can, even today, characterize this fervent art form. Quinn’s, the Hudson Valley seat of avantgarde and experimental jazz, is not represented, nor is any other community on the east side of the river, which—get this—has two banks.
Also un-implicated is the Falcon, arguably one of the nation’s leading non-urban jazz venues, and the remarkably well booked Lydia’s in Stone Ridge, the little jazz venue that could. Kingston’s Senate Garage, where the local jazz promoter Jazzstock has programmed its great run of shows, is not involved, though its founders John Menegon and Teri Roiger are performing in the festival. Most likely this just speaks to the Orange County centrism of the event and not to any acrimony in the regional jazz community. In any case, the selective nature of the festival highlights the embarrassment of jazz riches we enjoy here year round.
The Hudson Valley Jazz Festival runs from Thursday, August 18 through Sunday, August 21. Below is a complete listing of events. For more information, visit https://www.hudsonvalleyjazzfest.org/ and contact individual venues for details.
Thursday, August 18
6:30 P.M.: The Hudson Valley Jazz Sextet with Joe and Gabriele Tranchina, Ed Littman, J. Brunka, Steve Rubin and Bob Magnuson, presented by On The Lawn, 1405 Kings Hgwy. Sugar Loaf. Free outdoor concert, bring chairs and blankets.
7:00 P.M.: The Kaya Nicole Jazz Trio presented by Mary Ann’s 23 1/2 N. Main St. Port Chester.
7:00 P.M.: Rave Tesar, with Jeff Ciampa and Frank Pagano Presented by Unison Arts Center 68 Mountain Rest Rd, New Paltz.
7:00 P.M. Gus Mancini & the Sonic Soul Orkestra featuring Will Reinke on Drums, Michael Colletti on Bass, Peter Head and Mark Dzuiba on guitars, Gus Mancini on Saxophone and Synth at Front Street Tavern, 63 N. Front St. Kingston.
Friday, August 19
6:30 P.M. Latin Jazz Siete, featuring Danny Delvalle, Pito Castillo, Lew Scott, Dave Janeway, Larry Moses, Harvey Tibbs, Rick Kriska. Lewis Park, Main St. Warwick, In case of rain, Buckbee Center, 2 Colonial Ave. Warwick. Show made possible by The Town of Warwick, space via Warwick Historical Society.
7:00 P.M. The Teri Roiger Trio with John Menegon& Matt Garrity. Presented by The Front Street Tavern, 63 N. Front St. Kingston.
7:00 P.M. Nail, featuring Neil Alexander, Brian Mooney, and Nadav Snir-Zelniker, Unison Arts Center, 68 Mountain Rest Rd. New Paltz.
Saturday, August 20
11:30 AM The Steve Raleigh Jazz Band, Steve Raleigh, Vinnie Martucci, Lew Scott, Matt Garrity at Front St Tavern, 63 N. Front St. Kingston.
3:00 P.M. Improv music presented by Brian Kastan with three with Special guests. Continuum Art & Photography, Windermere Ave., Greenwood Lake.
7:00 P.M.- Stanley Jordan, presented by The Bearsville Theater, 291 Tinker Street, Woodstock.
7:30 The Village of Warwick presents guitar virtuoso Oz Noy With Anton Fig and Jerry Z. at The Village Green Railroad Ave., Warwick, outdoor, free.
7:00 P.M. Slide Attack with Howard Levy, Alan Goidel, Hiroshi Yamazaki, Michael Goetz, Chuck Zeuren, presented by the Village of Greenwood Lake at Thomas Morahan Park.
7:00 P.M. The Rick Savage Group with Eliot Zigmund, David Janeway, and Steve LaSpina presented by UpFront Gallery, 31 Jersey Ave, Port Jervis. Students of participating musicians get half price admission.
6:00 P.M. DUET with Claudia Forest, JohnAhmadjian and Chris Macchia presented by Stone House Tavern, 4802 US-209, Accord.
Sunday, August 22
2:00 P.M. Bill Ware & the Upstate Allstars, featuring vibraphonist Bill Ware, Matt King, Matt Garrity, John Menegon, and Teri Roiger, presented by the Albert Wisner Library, 1 McFarland Dr. Warwick.
5:30 P.M. Hudson Valley Jazz Festival presents Joe Vincent Tranchina Composers 4-um with Eric Person, Robert Kopec, and Peter O’Brien. Buckbee Center, 2 Colonial Ave. Warwick.
Join the family! 
