Wally Holmes: Evangelist, Composer, Producer, Jazz Man

“I should have gone in and pounded the table,” he said, “but that isn’t my style.” Wally Holmes didn’t need to pound tables; throughout his life, he commanded attention the old-fashioned way: through talent, hard work, persistence—and an astonishing skill in the obscure art of solfeggio. Waldo (Wally) Holmes passed away on September 1, 2021. Holmes was best known to the jazz world as the producer of the sprawling Sweet & Hot Jazz Festival from 1995 until 2011, bringing together thousands of jazz fans and hundreds of musicians that represented a wide range of jazz genres that he was determined to perpetuate. Sweet & Hot descended upon the Marriott Hotel near LAX for five days every Labor Day weekend. Wally, his bald pate gleaming and his ready smile beaming, would wander through the eight packed venues—each a hotel meeting or ballroom transformed into a Hangover Room, a Ramparts Street, a Roseland Ballroom—relishing every solo ragtime piano and plectrum banjo, bawdy barroom blues, tailgate trombone, and roaring big band. The festival seemed to be a personal culmination in a sense, an ingathering of the disparate musical sensibilities that Holmes immersed himself in at different stages of his life. The first “stage” was provided by his parents, Pentecostal ministers with musical backgrounds. For the first years of his life, Wally, his older brother Rober
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Richard Simon taught English in the Los Angeles Community College District before taking up the bass at the age of 30. He studied with the legendary Red Callender, and began working with LA’s elder jazz elite, including Buddy Collette, Teddy Edwards, Lorez Alexandria, and Plas Johnson. Visit him online at www.richardsimon.com; write him at [email protected].

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