Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla Master Zakir Hussain, 73, Succumbs to Illness
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
Cindy Blackman Santana will be among the performers at the inaugural San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival.
(Photo: Courtesy Cindy Blackman Santana)While politicians proclaim crisis on the U.S. and Mexico border, one jazz producer sees perfect harmony. On Oct. 4–6, the inaugural San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival launches with a lineup that should make border crossings the most popular activity of the weekend.
The festival, being produced by San Diego Jazz Ventures, will feature concerts across the Southern California/Baja California region, focusing on the area’s musical comaraderie and expansiveness.
“We launched San Diego Jazz Ventures in 2020 with the goal to create a major jazz festival that would be binational in scope,” said Dan Atkinson, festival founder and executive director. “To me as a native San Diegan, our location on the border, adjacent to the increasingly vibrant city of Tijuana, is a unique asset that opens a world of opportunities for people who live and work here. The designation of our two cities as the World Design Capital provided the catalyst to bring our vision for the festival into reality, with the collaboration of some very essential partners from both sides of the border.”
This year’s lineup focuses on musicians who have deep cross-border ties, like San Diego trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos’ sextet featuring pianist Gerald Clayton, Rolling Stones saxophonist Karl Denson and Dizzy Gillespie drummer Ignacio Berroa. The lineup also includes Mexico City-born, New York-based vocalist Magos Herrera, whose Aire project combines her jazz quartet and San Diego’s Hausmann String Quartet; Tijuana’s Nortec Collective; Cindy Blackman Santana; and Latin jazz/funk band Sure Fire Soul Ensemble.
Ensenada trumpeter, composer, educator and bandleader Ivan Trujillo, an artistic advisor to the San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival, also will be featured with his band.
The music takes place at the California Center for the Arts Concert Hall in Escondido, Tijuana’s Avenida Revolución and Quartyard in downtown San Diego’s East Village.
For more information, visit sdtjjazz.org. DB
“Watching people like Max Roach or Elvin Jones and seeing how they utilize the whole drum kit in a very rhythmic and melodic way and how they stretched time — that was a huge inspiration to me,” Hussain said in DownBeat.
Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
Gerald and John Clayton at the family home in Altadena during a photo shoot for the June 2022 cover of DownBeat. The house was lost during the Los Angeles fires.
Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
Queen Latifah extols Harlem and the Apollo Theater at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.
Dec 12, 2024 1:58 AM
Cuban-American jazz trumpet legend Arturo Sandoval and Harlem’s Apollo Theater were among the honorees at the 2024…
“With jazz I thought it must be OK to be Black, for the first time,” says singer Sofia Jernberg.
Jan 2, 2025 10:50 AM
On Musho (Intakt), her recent duo album with pianist Alexander Hawkins, singer Sofia Jernberg interprets traditional…
The Old Country: More From The Deer Head Inn arrives 30 years after ECM issued the Keith Jarret Trio live album At The Deer Head Inn.
Jan 21, 2025 7:38 PM
Last November, Keith Jarrett, who has not played publicly since suffering two strokes in 2018, greenlighted ECM to drop…
