A tip for Denverites: It's a haul to make it to Telluride for the three-day jazz party, which kicked off on Friday, August 8, this year. The festival pops off at Town Park on the east end of Telluride, and attendees can pay to pitch a tent in the adjacent campground, just a few minutes walk away from the festival entrance.
At 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, when the music began on the outdoor stage, the festival lawn was fairly sparse of fans, many of whom had ventured out the night before for Jazz After Dark. It was the latecomers' loss, as the first artist was indicative of performances to come — the End All Quintet, a jazz-fusion outfit with post-rock influences (think the math-rock syncopation of Don Caballero). The five piece outfit (sax/keys/guitar/bass/drums), which formed at the University of Denver and released its first single, "Momentum," in December last year, garnered hundreds of new fans after an hour-long set under the blazing afternoon sun (the temperature was in the 70s, but at 8,754 feet in altitude, the sunlight gets intense).
While the headliners — Trombone Shorty, Kamasi Washington, and Karl Denson's Tiny Universe — slayed as expected (particularly Denson's Saturday night set, which was otherworldly; Denson mixing up sax and flute acrobatics with his full-force band), the discovery of new, young talent was the true feature of the festival.
Parlor Greens, an instrumental trio of organ, guitar and drums, followed up with a heavy, funky set before Voodoo Orchestra took the stage. Voodoo Orchestra is a twenty-piece outfit with a fifteen-person horn section, and all of the musicians are between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. The teens came together in Utah via a youth music program, and together they married jump swing with rockabilly and jazzy blues. The energy brought the mid-afternoon crowd, finally filled out, to its feet — particularly when Big Bad Voodoo Daddy's tenor sax-man Karl Hunter joined the youngsters onstage.
BTTRFLY Quintet, a supergroup of Denver musicians that includes two members of Lettuce and two from Break Science, brought its blend of jazz, funk and soul for the penultimate set of the night, and had the crowd standing and cheering. The audience remained electrified as Karl Denson's Tiny Universe finished the night out with massive bombast.
Sunday morning brought the Jazz Festival's New Orleans Second Line Parade, with brass bands accompanied by Big Easy-style floats tossing beads marching down the main drag, Colorado Avenue. It ended up with an extended lawn jam adjacent to the festival grounds, where a circle of young horn blowers busted out an extended remix of Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams."
This led to the first act on the festival stage, which was the weekend's highlight. The Telluride Student All-Star Jazz Ensemble is a revolving cast of student musicians who come to town a week before the festival to join up and collaborate. This year's cast included vibraphonist Daniel Trujillo from Westminster; tenor saxophonist Ryan Black of Denver; pianist Scarlett Before Horses, also of Denver; standup bassist Alexa Cornejo of Eugene, Oregon; alto saxophonist Madhav Ramaprasad of San Diego, California; trumpeter Miri Izenberg from Irvine, California; and Robert Rodriguez Rojas from Heredia, Costa Rica.
Each band member presented an original composition they'd written, and considering they only had a week to arrange the accompaniment from the remainder of the outfit, these young people were tighter than imaginable. It's a tribute to the organizers and to program directors Josh Quinlan and Annie Booth (both veterans of the band themselves) that the festival not only presents amazing young musicians, but nurtures them as well.
Later in the afternoon, the nine women of Brooklyn's Brass Queens took the stage for a female show of force. The queens play New Orleans by way of New York City brass, with brassy attitudes to match. They were a joy to watch, and their talent showed they have nothing to prove despite male domination in the genre.
London's Kokoroko came on next, channeling West African music through a jazzy, psychedelic filter. Then at 8 p.m., Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue took the stage for the festival's final performance. Both acts were as impressive as expected, but the true joy of the Telluride Jazz Festival was the discovery of a new generation of jazz musicians making their mark on the expansive and experimental genre. We can't wait for next year.
Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue at Telluride Jazz Festival's final set Sunday night
Telluride Jazz Festival
