If you think that Bethel Woods boasts a big field for a festival, you should see the one that the Hudson Valley Jazz Festival transpires on. Just eyeballing it, it appears to be about 70 miles long and 30 miles wide, crossing a major river and numerous interstates as it folds mountains, farms, piers and docks, village squares, and small cities into its loose embrace. Good luck finding your friends at this festival. If it is any assurance, this big “field” will still smell like weed, just because everything does now.
Now in its 14th season The Hudson Valley Jazz Festival is, of course, a dispersed, multi-venue, multi-community showcase of regional and national jazz talent. In that way, it is like the world famous Montreal Jazz festival, which takes over the heart of that great city each summer, pressing all theaters and clubs into its service and erecting outdoor stages on every corner and in every alley; or even like Kingston’s now-venerable O+ Festival, festivals that transform and unify civic spaces under a single cultural banner for an interval, requiring buy-in and cooperation from participating venues and town offices. The fact that the HVJF stretches far beyond city and even county lines says something significant, definitive even, about the nature of the arts in the HV: no single community can claim a concentrated “scene,” per se; we just don’t have the population density for that. But what we do have is a disproportionate population of gifted artists. Taken as a whole, viewed through the wide-angle regional lens, there is a lot going on here and there is a distinctive identity. And jazz is a big part of it.
The 14th annual HVJF runs from August 9 through 13. Its venues (more than a dozen venues hosting more than 20 shows!) stretch from Warwick (where the festival was effectively founded), Port Jervis, and Sugar Loaf in Orange County to Kingston and Woodstock in northern Ulster, with spurs and offshoots in all directions. One of its keynote events—a performance by the ageless and impish wonder of 20th and now 21st century serious music David Amram—takes place across the river at the hallowed Howland Cultural Center in Beacon (August 12). The furthest outlier on the map—in a festival based on outlying—is Pierson Park in Tarrytown, where Vanessa Racci, a dynamic, retro cabaret-style singer with a special passion for the music of Italian Americans, performs on Friday, August 11 at 6:30.
A few of the HVSF venues are those well known in the area for their year-round jazz curation. Lydia’s in Stone Ridge is a little-engine-that-could jazz room, routinely bringing in outsize names and presenting all kinds of challenging progressive jazz in an unlikely space under the leadership of Mark Usvolk. One of the really exciting shows of this year’s festival—the Jeff Ciampa Quartet with the adventurous trumpet player Chris Pasin—takes place at Lydia’s on August 12 at 7:00 PM.
To the southeast, the region’s undisputed mecca of jazz excellence—the Falcon in Marlboro (we miss you, Tony)—hosts this year’s festival-closing blowout, an August 13, 7:00 PM performance by the large Analog Jazz Orchestra with a genuinely special guest, the saxophonist Joe Lovano, a name high on the short list of most important tenor players of the last half century (known and beloved to me foremost for his years of soulmate-level collaboration with John Scofield). Mr. Lovano’s long-time Orange County residency has legitimized the jazz culture in that area in much the same way that DeJohnette, Holland and Abercrombie ennobled Woodstock.
Lovano’s festival appearance highlights one of the other probably-not-accidental themes of this year’s HVJF: it is a husband and wife thing. Joe’s wife, the virtuoso jazz singer Judi Silvano, headlines an evening of Summertime Songs in Montgomery on Friday August 11 at 7:00 PM. On he bill with her are the slick and versatile guitar whiz Matt Finck, as well as the husband and wife duo of vocalist/pianist Teri Roiger and bassist/composer John Menegon, well known to locals as the founders (along with Bread Alone owner Dan Leader) of Jazzstock, the long-running jazz promoter based out of Woodstock first and then Kingston. Also on this lively bill is the splendid jazz/latin vocalist Gabriele Tranchina, who, along with her husband and fellow festival performer pianist Joe Vincent Tranchina, is one of the leading lights of Orange County’s unlikely concentration of jazz genius.
Jazz is of course an African American property that has served as the crucible for a century’s worth of profound and global (improvised) dialogue. But, to be frank, it still needs to get its gender story square, and the prevalence of female artists in this year’s lineup (not all singers by any means) positions the HVJF as a thought leader in this urgent correction.
As a genre, jazz is much like rock in that each generation must, per force, out-radicalize the last, typically by either advancing its harmonic rocket science or by abandoning it all together in favor of a new musical logic. But more like the folk genres, jazz tends to revere and honor its forebears even as it topples them. Jazz is thus a tradition of revolutions. The HVJF lineup is dotted with great players who have left their mark. Consider for example a pair of crucially important drummers who will be appearing in separate events: the downtown avant-garde master Harvey Sorgen and the ultra-sensitive drummer Elliot Zigmund, who has performed extensively with the two highest masters of empathic, impressionistic small-ensemble jazz: Bill Evans and Jim Hall.
These are not the only stars on the bill. There are, for example, the heavy and storied drummer Adam Nussbaum and the organ master Pete Levin whose resume is barely less impressive than his rockstar brother Tony’s. Meanwhile, the lineup is filled with names that all local jazz fans know well, regulars on the HV scene with national connections and reputations, talents we should hardly take for granted just because we get to the privilege to hear them a lot: bassist Rob Kopec, keyboardist Neil Alexander, guitarist Steve Raleigh, saxophonist Bob Shaut, and on and on.
The HVJF was founded by a jazz drummer, Steve Rubin, not long after he made his way from New York City to the Warwick area. “The [HVJF] mission,” Rubin says, “has always been to celebrate the music of jazz utilizing artists deserving of wider recognition. It’s common for many of us to support the name-recognizable talent in music, film, theatre, etc. Many deserve that. But the arts as a livelihood simply does not have enough space to celebrate everyone who is an artist. So the mission of the festival is also to call attention to artists deserving wider recognition.”
An underappreciated aspect of Rubin’s heroic labor-of-love effort on behalf of the HVJF is the securing, developing and extending of relationships with the venues and communities that serve as hosts and partners. “Relationships with venues evolve,” Rubin says. “Part of that is discovering folks who are interested and finding a formula that works. The idea of the festival is to primarily present groups led by Hudson Valley resident jazz artists. It is important to not have duplicate shows or too much in the same town on the same day. Coordinating who, when, and so forth is what makes this series an unofficial collective collaborative. The presenting venues receive significant advertising given that the festival has been covered by The New York Times, DownBeat,JazzTimes, NYC Jazz Record, WBGO Jazz Radio in addition to much of the local media.”
The arts, as your mother and other sensible people always told you, are a hell of a way to try to make a living, and jazz is an especially tough road, a music known for both a grueling apprenticeship and a narrow commercial niche. To hear Rubin speak of it, The HVJF is all about recognizing that high mastery happens even when fame and economic sufficiency don’t necessarily reward the master’s achievement. I’m with him on this. “There is a matter of supply and demand,” he says. “I support the artist choice for anyone who feels that’s what they identify with. Play an instrument, study, take acting classes, write a play, make a film, pursue that. Support yourself in ways that keep you in that field or related. Teach, run a recording studio. Or be a carpenter and do gigs at the same time. We must appreciate art at its face value, how we take it in, how we feel about the experience, and not prejudge by identity or material worth. Financial reward is of course a real way to speak to the legitimacy of the artist, but it is not the only one.”
The 14th annual Hudson Valley Jazz Festival is a literally sprawling, inclusive, and inspired event. I can barely scratch the surface of its attractions. But the website can. Make with haste to hudsonvalleyjazzfest.org and pick a few shows to hit. You won’t regret it.
Join the family! 
