The 2022 San Diego Jazz Festival, the first held in person in three years, got underway on Thanksgiving Eve at the newly (since 2019) expanded Town and Country Convention Center in the Mission Valley area of San Diego. While the hotel has been greatly enlarged, the music venues were unchanged from 2019.
I arrived in town a day ahead of time from the West Coast Ragtime Festival in Sacramento and stayed, as usual, at a less expensive—there’s no such thing as inexpensive in California—hotel near the T&C. This extra time gave me a chance to scope out the new facilities. In addition, my reasonable hotel rate included breakfast, which is an extra cost at the T&C.
The festival’s format was similar to what was followed on my two previous visits, in 2018 and 2019. I had viewed the band lineup on the website before leaving home, so I had a good idea of which groups I wanted to see and which I could miss, if necessary, without feeling disappointed. But I made my selections with a pencil so I could make revisions on the fly. Some nineteen bands and/or vocal groups were on the card. There were two late cancellations due to illness among their members—Grand Dominion and Titanic. I was looking forward to seeing both of them. No other bands were booked as replacements, perhaps because there wasn’t enough time to do so.
I did see both opening bands on Wednesday evening—High So
