Sep 22, 2026 12:26 PM
Hyde Park Jazz Fest on Chicago’s South Side to Present 20th Edition
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival will take place for the 20th time on the final weekend of September 2026. Beginning half…
Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band shared their spiritual brand of jazz with San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival audiences.
(Photo: Courtesy San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival)It’s challenging to pinpoint a defining element of this year’s San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival (SDTJ Jazz), which was held over an elongated weekend Oct. 1–4 at three cities in two countries.
Was it the mighty Mingus Dynasty playing in Tijuana in the shadow of an oversized mural of the big man himself? Perhaps it was pianist/composer Danilo Pérez, who first led groups of students and then fellow educators in Escondido, about 35 miles northeast of San Diego, before closing out the festival the following night in Tijuana with an incendiary set leading the local La Covacha Big Band. Or maybe it was drummer Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band sharing their spiritual brand of jazz for hushed Southern Californian and Mexican audiences.
Opening night was held in San Diego’s East Village, situated just outside of the city’s famed Gaslight Quarter. The Quartyard is an appealing, enclosed outdoor space shaped like a baseball diamond with the bandstand set up across where home plate would be.
There seems to be an unwritten yet understandable rule that jazz festivals in 2026 must celebrate the centenaries of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. To its credit, this year’s SDTJ Jazz didn’t shoehorn tributes to either into their bookings. But the timeless compositions of the two titans were represented by festival opener Binational Youth Ensemble, which also opened Sunday’s day of admission-free music in Tijuana.
Featuring students age 10 and older from trumpeter/educator Gilbert Castellanos’ San Diego-based Young Lions Jazz Conservatory and fellow trumpeter/educator Iván Trujillo’s Instituto Contemporáneo de Música de Baja California, the international group presented Miles and Trane selections such as “Blue Train” and “So What.” (It was a kick to hear classics from Kind of Blue performed with clarinet and flute as well as trumpet and alto saxophone.)
The Tijuana-based Colectivo Fronterizo was up next, making its U.S. debut. Fueled by MC Fémina Fatal’s rapid-fire recitations and the lively electric guitar/bass guitar/drums rhythm section, the sextet’s funk-rap style was punctuated by its tenor saxophone and trombone horn section.
“TJ was the second neighborhood … so it’s really special to be playing here at the San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival,” declared Jungle Fire percussionist Steve Haney, whose family emigrated from Colombia to nearby Chula Vista. The horn- and percussion-laden band’s self-described Tropi-Funk closed out opening night energetically. Haney spoke of transcending “these imaginary lines that separate us”—an ideal also applicable to the nature of the group, which included members from both Los Angeles and San Diego counties.
While jazz festivals like Monterey have presented the same groups on its main stage and also on the general admission grounds for two different types of performances, this year’s SDTJ Jazz offered seven of its nine acts in different countries. Day two, which was unticketed and in the open, was held on Tijauna’s famed Avenida Revolución. Flanked by everything from hotels, restaurants and bars to fast-food chains, cigarette carts and an actual Tijauna gift shop, the bandstand was set up in front of more than a dozen long rows of white folding chairs.
Colectivo Fronterizo and rapera Fémina Fatal performed a second consecutive day, opening the southern festivities. A largely seated hometown crowd listened intently while a few audience members swayed at the sides. More local heroics from the fusion/“punk jazz” unit Señales Selañes entranced the occasionally headbanging crowd. Featuring soprano saxophone, keyboard, bass guitar and drums, the young quartet dazzled with originals and Coltrane’s “Impressions.”
Tijuana-based bandleader Charlie Chávez served as a festival bookend, closing the first night in Tijuana with his Afrotruko big band and then opening the following afternoon with an expanded version of the group on the California Center for the Arts, Escondido’s outdoor stage. By presenting a variety of styles, including bolero and mambo, Afrotruko was able to educate parts of the latter crowd while covering Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington’s more familiar “Caravan” for good measure.
(For those wondering why the city of Escondido would host concerts for a festival that’s based in San Diego: While festival founder and Executive Producer Daniel Atkinson is a veteran of producing jazz concerts within San Diego proper, he found the California Center for the Arts, Escondido and its opera house-like 1,500-seat capacity theater to be best suited for SDTJ Jazz.)
If this year’s SDTJ Jazz had a de facto artistic ambassador, it would have been Pérez. The founder (in 2010) of the Berklee Global Institute and the youngest-ever player in Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nation Orchestra, the Panama native and Wayne Shorter Quartet alumnus embodies the borderless nature of both jazz and this particular festival. “It’s right out of the lessons I learned with Dizzy: Music is the strongest tool for diplomacy,” said Pérez, in a brief interview prior to his first performance.
Pérez understood the assignment, as they say, collaborating with three different groups between his time on Escondido’s indoor stage and in Tijuana, and performing nearly all different pieces with each. “I like to put myself in situations where I don’t have full control,” he explained. “That’s from the Wayne Shorter school.”
When first leading a group of students from San Diego State University’s (SDSU) Jazz Ensembles, he explained to the audience the Panamanian tamborito rhythm that they’d been studying with him. After the two student groups performed, Pérez led an all-star group of mostly SDSU faculty members. (Blade, Pérez’s “brother” from the Shorter quartet and their own Children of the Light Trio, didn’t speak much in either country but let The Fellowship Band’s sublime music do plenty of talking.)
Vocalist Lucía Gutiérrez is another Platonic ideal of an SDTJ Jazz artist. In 2022, the Veracruz native became the first Mexican to win the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. She was presented at last year’s STDJ Jazz in a jazz setting and returned this year to perform on outdoor stages in Escondido and Tijuana. This time, she sang Son Jarocho classics as a member of the Familia Gutiérrez, which includes father Ramon on requinto guitar and vocals and her brother, multi-instrumentalist Santiago.
Atkinson posited that Los Angeles native and frequent Tijuana visitor Charles Mingus was one of the first border artists, so the seven-piece Mingus Dynasty was another ace booking. During their Saturday indoor performance in Escondido, tenor saxophonist and co-leader Wayne Escoffery’s extended introduction to “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” seemed as if it would bring the walls down with its pathos. Moving from the lawns and trees and strip malls of the Escondido to Tijauna’s street vendors, concrete and asphalt, the septet seemed to live score the surroundings (including a beautiful Mingus mural on the same block) as it broke into “Ysabel’s Table Dance” the next evening.
“We came through the wall today, and I couldn’t help noticing that the wall shouldn’t be there,” said bassist/Mingus Dynasty co-leader and house arranger Boris Kozlov about a half hour into the band’s Sunday set. “It should be a bridge—just a bridge.” DB
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