by Robert Tate / Jazz Now – Aug. 1995

After four years, the KCSM Jazz on the Hill Festival has settled into a comfortable groove. There were no big names from distant places this year, but a mixed bag of Jazz and near Jazz in an outdoor ambience made for a pleasant weekend on the grass if not for great musical memories. The sound system comprised two batteries of speakers, one on either side of the stage. Those seated in front got blasted while those farther away had trouble hearing. More speakers scattered throughout the audience area would have solved the problem.

The other annoyance was that the KCSM disc jockeys felt they had to talk every moment when music was not being played on stage. In past years, I recall, the sound technicians would simply switch to the radio station when there was a lull in the live music, but this year we had to try and ignore scenes like Mal Sharpe and Alisa Clancy chattering about how silly it was that they had to chatter like this until the music came on.

The music: Monarch Records saxophonist Alex Murzyn played a tough ice-breaker set. Fred Berry’s Jazz 91 All-Star Big Band contained some of the Bay Area’s finest musicians. For most of the gig the drummer was Dave Rokeach, but Louie Bellson played for about three numbers and traded fours with Rokeach in one of the high points of the first afternoon. Trombonist Wayne Wallace’s Rhythm and Rhyme played Latin and world beat music. We had seen Wayne the previous week with Mel Martin’s Bebop and Beyond, but he seemed more comfortable here in his own group. Dick Conte served up straight-ahead Jazz with a lot of scale runs, fast fingering, and overblowing from saxophonist Steve Heckman.

Dick stayed on to comp behind Al “Jazzbeaux” Collins’s “rejuberized”-for-the-nineties readings of his classic fairytales, “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Goldilocks.” Following his reading, Jazzbeaux was presented with the first annual KCSM Jazz Legend award and a trophy created by Vern Allie. Ray Obiedo, Harvey Mandel, and Wild Mango closed the first day. We missed these, although we had heard Wild Mango in Monterey a year earlier and thought they were sensational.

Several high school bands played during the second day of the festival. Although many tend to dismiss these as not worthy of notice in our big-name-dominated culture, they are in fact where the music is in the real world.

Mark Little’s trio expanded to five with a saxophonist and a vocalist who sounded like a reincarnation of Mr. B(illy Eckstine). Shanna Carlson sang and accompanied herself on piano. The big outdoor speakers were wrong, but Shanna still broke my heart with a delicate bass-vocal duet on “Just Friends.” Chet Smith, who was listed as an orchestral synthesizes wizard, lived up to his billing with a version of “Take the A Train” that began with a long impressionistic evocation of New York. Pete Escovedo and The Tommy Castro Band closed the show.