Planet Jazz, Concert Review >>
Excerpt from The 2002 Playboy Jazz Festival
By Scott Yanow
Attending the Playboy Jazz Festival (an institution in Los Angeles since 1979), a pair of 8 1/2 concerts held over a June weekend at the Hollywood Bowl in Hollywood, California requires a sense of humor, endurance, tolerance, and the ability to have fun no matter what is occurring on stage! Sometimes the music performed only has a slight connection to jazz. The audience is more in the mood to party and to socialize than to debate over what is and is not jazz, so the ensembles that generate the most positive response from the crowd are the ones that create danceable music, no matter what the style. This is a party with jazz as opposed to a jazz party.
Once one realizes what the atmosphere is like (ballad vocals and quiet piano solos are traditionally drowned out), the Playboy Jazz Festival can be enjoyed on its own terms. 18,000 or so people attend each day, and 15,000 hang out until the final group's set, partly because they love the party, and also because they know that they cannot get out of the Hollywood Bowl parking lot early! People who go to the Playboy Jazz Festival more than once know that being there is like being part of a giant commune, an endless party that also occasionally has something occurring on stage that is worth looking at.
A constant good point is Playboy's revolving stage, which means that there is no downtime between groups. A bad point is the festival's longtime emcee Bill Cosby who, not only does not prepare any monologues or bother learning which groups are playing, but occasionally yells into the microphone for no particular reason and occasionally gets in the way of the music....
...The most unusual music of the day was provided by Les Yeux Noirs, a French band comprised of two violinists, guitar, cello, bass, drums, accordion and cymbalum. Although not really jazz, their set held one's interest. The violinists were virtuosos (often playing rapid unisons) and the music almost sounded like rapid bluegrass, infused with European folk melodies and occasional vocals.
01/01/03
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