“If I had the wings of an angel,” goes the old song. I would have needed wings to enjoy all the music at the 2024 Redwood Coast Music Festival. It would have taken five energized angels, their wings in top form, to see everything. One hundred sets, six venues in lovely Eureka, California: a musical banquet or perhaps a deluge from Thursday night to Sunday night, October 3-6.
I live to video this music, and this year I had some assistance: my good friend Mark Voitenko offered his services to record some sets (he is now JAZZ LIVES’ Video Chief of Staff). Together we saw perhaps twenty-five sets, with the focus on hot music. Others savored blues from Georgia (Jontavious Willis) and Rhode Island (the endearing Duke Robillard), zydeco, rockabilly, tributes to Chet Atkins and Merle Travis. We headed for the sacred lands of Armstrong, Morton, Moten, Condon, Bessie and Clara, BG, Duke. We saw many dear friends: Marc Caparone, Dawn Lambeth, Clint Baker, Katie Cavera, Hal Smith, Mikiya Matsuda, Sam Rocha, Dan Barrett, and a New York infusion from the “EarRegulars,” Jon-Erik Kellso, Matt Munisteri, Dennis Lichtman; new St. Louis pals Valerie Kirchhoff, Ethan Leinwand, T.J. Muller.
Most exciting were the debut visits of veterans John S. Reynolds and Ray Skjelbred, and the Austin, Texas, phenomenon Alice Spencer.
Some highlights from our exhilarating and exhausting journey, which began Friday afternoon with a dreamy set of 1931-33 dance music created by suitably attired Mikiya Matsuda and the Alcatraz Islanders: Mikiya on lap steel guitar; Casey MacGill on vocals, ukulele, cornet; John S. Reynolds, guitar, vocal; Dennis Lichtman, clarinet and fiddle; Matt Weiner, bass; the versatile Riley Baker, drums. They offered echoes of Louis and Bing: “Out of Nowhere,” “I Cover the Waterfront,” “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” “Home,” as well as Hawaiian pop tunes, “A Little Town Girl,” and “I Wonder Where My Little Hula Girl Has Gone.” The Sequoia Center smelled like pineapple.
Then, a characteristically energized set by Clint Baker’s Jazz Band, vocals by Jessica King, with Clint, trumpet; Ryan Calloway, clarinet; Nate Ketner, tenor saxophone; Riley Baker, trombone; Ray Skjelbred, piano; Katie Cavera, bass; Danny Coots, drums, with “Big Butter and Egg Man” and Everybody Loves My Baby.” Jessica King wooed us with “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home,” “Hesitatin’ Blues, and closed the set with an uplifting “You Meet the Nicest People in Your Dreams.” It wasn’t all light, bright, and sparkling, though, as Ray Skjelbred, the Master, played Victoria Spivey’s “T.B. Blues,” Clint reminding us that Ray had worked as Victoria’s accompanist.
Hal Smith’s Mortonia Seven, with Steve Pikal, bass; Kris Tokarski, piano; Dave Bennett, clarinet; Katie Cavera, guitar; Dave Kosmyna, cornet; T. J. Muller, trombone, tore into “Pretty Baby” and “Panama”; Dave Kosmyna sang “Ballin’ the Jack” as only he can, and there was a moody “Smoke-House Blues.”
The Holland-Coots Jazz Quintet, with Brian Holland, piano; Steve Pikal; Danny Coots, Marc Caparone, cornet; Jacob Zimmerman, clarinet, was graced by the passionate singing of Alice Spencer, who showed us her heart to great effect with a cheerful “You Took Advantage of Me,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and darkly lovely readings of “The Very Thought of You” and “I’m Through With Love.” In “Winin’ Boy Blues,” Marc Caparone sang of another kind of love, exemplified by a spider in search of joy.
The first of two sets by the EarRegulars, the heroic denizens of the Ear Inn in downtown Manhattan, was delightfully unusual. Jon-Erik Kellso, trumpet, and Matt Munisteri, guitar, have been colleagues for decades. But the Ear Inn has no piano, so it was a marvelous shock to hear Ray Skjelbred’s dissonant chords, rumbling bass, and romping lyricism, as well as Dan Barrett, trombone and trumpet, and Matt Weiner. A two-trumpet “Smiles” was a highlight, as well as a tender Barrett-Skjelbred “Pennies from Heaven” at its original ballad tempo. Jonathan Doyle, swaying as the electricity of the music passed through him, joined for a meditative “Wabash Blues” and a stomping “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.”
I’ve written about the gritty singer Valerie Kirchhoff and her husband, pianist Ethan Leinwand, in these pages already, so I will be brief. Alongside Muller, Kosmyna, Hal Smith, Andy Schumm, clarinet; and their favorite bassist, Rodrigo Mantovani, they performed fourteen songs, ranging from a rollicking “Fan It” to the solemn “Down Hearted Blues,” and won the crowd.
A remarkable “big-band” set, co-led by Doyle and Zimmerman, grouped ten musicians to sight-read arrangements, which they did splendidly. I was awed by Andy Schumm and Kellso’s individual homages to Louis on “All of Me,” as well as unhackneyed tributes to James P. Johnson, late Morton, Basie, Lester Young, and a few originals by the two reedmen. Emotionally compelling and completely expert.
Saturday began with Skjelbred, Zimmerman, and Weiner, all heroes of the Pacific Northwest scene. I was especially moved by Ray’s recasting of “You Rascal You” as a grieving elegy, “I’ll Be Sad When You’re Gone.” The three players acted as if they were having the most intimate musical conversation, ignoring the bandstand, the bright daylight, the audience, serving the songs.
Another set by Valerie and Ethan offered a fast blues about Grandma and Grandpa (you can imagine) as well as a soulful “Oh, Daddy!” with Andy Schumm evoking Joe Smith nobly on cornet.
Mikiya Matsuda and the Alcatraz Islanders returned for a thoroughly Hawaiian set, with Dave Stuckey singing “On A Cocoanut Island” in honor of Louis and the Mills Brothers, and a hilarious “I’m Pau.” A remarkable offering was Mikiya and Jonathan Stout, guitar, summoning up a 1939 disc featuring Allan Reuss and others as “Peck’s Bad Boys,” playing “I Never Knew.” Nowhere else but at the RCMF!
T.J. Muller’s Jazz-O-Maniacs, a hot septet devoted to Twenties-and-beyond St. Louis jazz, featured Kellso, Doyle, Barrett, Tokarski, Clint Baker, bass; Alex Hall, drums; Muller, guitar, vocals; Valerie Kirchoff as well. Their repertoire was deep and surprising: Moten’s “Kater Street Rag,” “Who Cares?” not the Gershwin classic but the 1929 pop tune sung by Eddie Condon on film, and “The Co-Ed.”
Hal Smith’s El Dorado Jazz Band, ferocious but also well-rehearsed, with Hal, washboard; Brian Holland, Schumm, banjo; Barrett, Calloway, Muller, cornet; Pikal, saluted Bunk Johnson “One Sweet Letter from You” and “Blue Bells, Goodbye,” and Kid Ory, “Savoy Blues,” as well as Freddie Keppard, “Messin’ Around” and “Here Comes the Hot Tamale Man.” A surprise was Dan Barrett at his most rhapsodic on “Just One More Chance,” unforgettably.
The EarRegulars returned with Skjelbred, Dennis Lichtman, Sam Rocha, bass, for rousers “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” “Happy Feet,” and “Hindustan,” (the last shifting from C to Eb, a chorus at a time, as they do) and a beautifully introspective, Crosby-inspired “Someday Sweetheart.”
I only got to hear one song by the Hollywood Hot Shots: Reynolds, Caparone, Zimmerman, Cavera, vocals by Dawn Lambeth) but it was a scorching “High Society” that invoked 1933 Louis and the wonderful Reynolds Brothers of ten years ago.
Sunday found us amidst happy dancers at the Eagle House for five sets and a closing bacchanalia.
A three-guitar session for Stout, Munisteri, Whit Smith, Pikal and the invaluable Collazo drew on jazz and pop classics. Alice Spencer returned with Hal Smith’s Overland Swing Express (Tokarski, Mikiya Matsuda, Doyle, Stout, and Barrett) and ventured deep into the Thirties and Forties for “Sing It Way Down Low,” “Say it Simple,” and a poignant “Draggin’ My Heart Around,” among others. A standout set paired Duke Robillard, guitar and vocal, with Marc Caparone’s Back O’Town All-Stars, the focus on Kansas City swing, pairing “Moten Swing” and “You’re Driving Me Crazy,” the latter sung fetchingly by Dawn Lambeth. Duke, both serious and irrepressible, sang T-Bone Walker’s “You Don’t Love Me (And I Don’t Care),” which wins a prize for best title, and Dawn returned for a deep-blue “Rocks in My Bed.” Jonathan Stout played (and sang) with his own Campus Five, the arrangements uplifted by Kosmyna, Zimmerman, Riley Baker, Tokarski, and Weiner, with very gentle vocals by Hilary Alexander. The dancers “crowded the floor,” (as the song goes) for Carl Sonny Leyland’s Boogie Woogie Boys: the shifting harmonies of “Breaking the Chandeliers” and “Strange Cargo” made listeners sit up straight and pay attention.
(photo by Michael Steinman)
The bacchanalia, with leaders Kellso, Munisteri, and Lichtman, went for two and a-half hours, with eight to ten musicians onstage for “A Shanty in Old Shanty Town,” “I Cover the Waterfront,” “Some of These Days,” “Just Squeeze Me,” and more. Naomi Uyama sang “My Blue Heaven”; Duke Robillard honored the past with “S.K. Blues.” Alas, I did not make it to the end. My camera batteries were still charged, but my physical ones were not. We left through happy crowds.
I could write more: of heroic Mark and Val Jansen, the never-at-a-loss volunteers, emotional reunions in the audience and on the bandstand, the Colombian food truck whose empanadas sustained my listening, but words aren’t enough for the joyous block party that is the RCMF. Over the next months, I will post more than two hundred videos that Mark Voitenko and I shot: they won’t substitute for being there, but they will have to sustain us until next October.
