Sunday August 16 - Haley and Casey at Idyllwild Jazz In The Pines 2015

[john]

Jazz in the Pines pursues a new, younger direction
Bruce Fessier, The Desert Sun 1:16 p.m. PDT August 6, 2015

After 21 years, the Idyllwild Jazz in the Pines has grown up and decided to let its children be its legacy....

Program director Marshall Hawkins, who envisioned the festival’s direction as an academy jazz instructor, couldn’t be happier with the change. He looks at it as an opportunity to let his alumni play a new kind of jazz that builds on tradition, but appeals to millennials.

“I wanted to bring people to the jazz festival to highlight the way the music was being taught,” said Hawkins, who toured as a bass player with the likes of Miles Davis, Shirley Horn and Richie Cole before settling in his wife’s home town of Idyllwild. “Acoustic jazz is what we do here. So, this is our jazz festival. It’s not smooth jazz, it’s not borderline rock ’n’ roll.

.....The conflicts began when The Associates began booking artists that appealed to middle-aged listeners of smooth jazz but alienated most of the young students Hawkins was teaching. Hawkins distanced himself from the booking and began playing evening shows in downtown Idyllwild that new program director Bubba Jackson thought competed with the festival. Hawkins thought the artists Jackson was booking with his connections as a DJ at public radio station KJazz in Long Beach was detracting from the festival’s community feel....

...“We have invested more resources into the festival with the express intent of making it the best ever. One other advantage we have is, as our young alumni become more and more famous in their field, we bring them back and they’re willing to work for less than they would at another festival because they’re supporting the same entity that supported them,” he said “So we have the likes of (Hawkins’ first student) Evan Christopher and Jason Jackson, who is a Grammy-winning trombonist in New York, Graham Dechter, who is on a meteoric rise as a young guitar virtuoso playing with John Clayton and Jeff Hamilton (of the Grammy-nominated Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra), and he can bring these guys with him.

“Likewise Casey Abrams, who is a real rising star, and Haley Reinhart, his compatriot, who are part of this collective post-modern jukebox. They are a group of young musicians, 20-somethings, who have stumbled upon this really interesting style wherein they take popular music — music by Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Meghan Trainor — and rearrange it. They re-appropriate it into 1920s and ’30s swing, and they are just blowing up on the Internet. They are really ushering in what I would say is a new generation of jazz enthusiasts — young people who are really into it. So we’re necessarily trying to bridge that generation gap....
http://www.desertsun.com/story/life/ente.../31194529/