Jazz festivals present one of the most lucrative pools of performing opportunities for today’s artists, but the representation of Latin Jazz at festivals varies widely. Some festivals feature Latin Jazz extensively, including a number of local and international artists in both headliner and support positions. Other festivals book artists with a safe and careful approach, sticking to more popularly accessible musicians, sometimes even stepping outside the traditional jazz world. The structure of a festival plays into the inclusion of Latin Jazz; smaller events can only book a few artists, while large multiple venues festivals hold the potential for more support. Regardless, festival organizers make definitive decisions when they choose artists for their events, and their choices make clear statements about their priorities. The lack of support for Latin Jazz at a jazz festival sends a negative message about the aesthetic, artistic, and cultural priorities of the organizers. Support of Latin Jazz, along with a wide range of jazz styles, displays a keen awareness of the modern jazz world and a dedication to the festival’s community. Since festivals constitute a major piece of the performing space for jazz artists, it’s important to keep an eye on the effects of festivals upon Latin Jazz.
The San Jose Jazz Festival offers some of the most extensive support for the Latin Jazz community found in festivals today. The three-day festival features nine stages full of constant music, drawing upon a combination of local and international talent. The festival includes a stage dedicated specifically to Latin Jazz and another stage reserved only for salsa bands. In addition, the festival regularly includes Latin Jazz artists upon their main stage and even sneaks Latin artists onto some of the side stages. They prioritize high quality music, drawing upon the deep roots of Latin Jazz and avoiding cheap imitations. The festival maintains a low price for admission, allowing an individual access to all nine stages for only $15 per day. The San Jose Jazz organization reaches out to the community and helps them understand the wealth of Latin Jazz talent in the Bay Area. They educate young people about the music through a Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble, making sure the genre reaches the next generation. In every way, the San Jose Jazz Festival sends a loud message that Latin Jazz is an important piece of the modern jazz world.
In an attempt to get the details behind the San Jose Jazz Festival and their outstanding support of Latin Jazz, I talked with San Jose Jazz’s Vice-Chairman Of The Board, Arturo Riera. An avid supporter of Latin Jazz, Riera advocates for the genre, but it’s not a difficult sell. San Jose Jazz provides fantastic support for Latin Jazz, as shown through their full integration of the style into the festival. Riera stays extensively involved in the greater Bay Area Latin Jazz community, giving him a keen insight into the overall artistic scene. In our conversation, Riera discusses the San Jose Jazz Festival, Bay Area Latin Jazz, youth in the genre, the importance of salsa, and much more. Enjoy!
Latin Jazz Corner: Maybe you could tell us a little bit about San Jose Jazz and your role in the group.
Arturo Riera: San Jose Jazz is actually a twenty-year-old organization. It began as a way of throwing a jazz concert down in San Jose. The first festival was actually put on peoples’ credit cards because they didn’t know if there would be sponsors around. Clearly over the last twenty years it has evolved. According to the city of San Jose, it is the only major tourist event of any value, in terms of attracting people to San Jose – if you think about why people might go there outside of business, the answer is hard to find. So the festival provides them an opportunity to showcase the city and the city’s downtown core. The million and a half roughly that we spend at the festival , generates about eighteen million in taxable income for the city. Also of late, over the last few years, both the San Jose Metro as well as the San Jose Business Journal have polled their users, basically asking them what’s their perception of the most important event in San Jose – some of the options that they were given were the San Jose Grand Prix when it was still around – and year after year, ours comes out as the best event. Whether you’re looking at a business type audience or whether you’re looking at just an entertainment crowd, people really love it.
So we see it as an opportunity to do a couple of things. One is to showcase the results of all our educational activities by providing young bands a place to play. Normally the way that you get to jazz is through a school program – a school jazz band or some kind of competitive band. We hold a San Jose Jazz Competition for bands in the Bay Area, so that educators get a chance to have their bands plays and also be rated by adjudicators. As a result, we can also then present a significant number of bands at our youth stage. So that’s a great way to showcase young talent. Some guys that are hitting the stage right now, like the Lebouf Brothers or some of the other young folks that are now making it on the scene actually came through our programs. So we’re very proud of that. The other thing that we do is showcase local artists and give them a venue that normally you’d have to leave the city or leave the country to get. You know, one of the things, especially on the Latin Jazz side, that musicians keep telling me is, “Oh my god, this is the best kept secret in the jazz world.” So whenever we’re able to bring in groups from Europe or New York or other places, they always are blown away by not only the quality of the venues, in terms of the level of the stages and the sound and the instruments that we provide, but also that it really takes over downtown in a way that I like to say makes San Jose a global capital for about 48 hours. You feel like you’re in New York or Paris, or Rome, because the city comes alive. For example, on Friday, we’re going to have a 48-hour jam session. We’re also working with downtown clubs to make sure that the club venues are playing jazz and presenting local music. So besides our nine stages this year, we also have gone deeply into the club community in San Jose to make sure that all the clubs are activated with jazz type activities. It goes from our stages to literally invigorating the whole downtown. The hotels and restaurants always tell us the same thing – “We always know it’s jazz week, because our business goes through the roof.”
The Latin Jazz and Salsa stages not only tend to be the most popular and well attended, but the more space we give them, the more people show. And so I would argue that the combination of Latin Jazz and Salsa stages match or beat the main stage crowds that we draw, just in terms of sheers numbers of people.
LJC: You really do have an emphasis upon Latin Jazz and Salsa, something that gets buried in other festivals. How did that become such a priority for the San Jose Festival?
AR: Well, I’ve been on the board almost six years and I think it was a priority long before I got there. They always had a Latin and a Salsa stage, and initially I think that their self-perception was that they were going to cater to a South Bay Hispanic crowd. I think it’s evident that Latin Jazz is part of a fabric of our popular culture – you hear it in commercials, you hear it all over the place. I think often the difficulty for a consumer is, “I love that, but where do I learn more about it? Who’s playing it? Where do I get to know more?” I sat in last Friday with John Calloway and made that statement to the crowd and heard, “Yea, that’s right!” and they were nodding their heads. So they festival allows us to educate as well as entertain about different flavors of jazz. Over the last four years, as a board member, and then board-chair, and now board vice-president, I’ll work very hard to put on the show and get funders and apply my PR and marketing skills to ensure its success, but the great pro-quo is that if we are going to present Latin Jazz, it has to be authentic, it has to be the real deal. It can’t be ear sauce. So over the past few years, they’ve actually allowed me to book those stages.
This year we’re trying to incorporate more Brazilian into the mix. The Brazilian community is growing here in the Bay Area and that allows us to address a different constituency. Between Forrofiando and SambaDa, we’ve got a little Brazilian for folks. I discovered last year in booking SambaDa, not only did they bring their own Santa Cruz audience that is passionate about them, but also that stage was really popular while they were there. People were dancing and singing. I go to a lot of these events, and you start to recognize a lot of people. But in this case, the Brazilian folks brought their own crowd. For us, it’s all about expanding the jazz tent and making sure that all the different colors are explored. This festival really allows us to push into the fringes of emerging jazz, young jazz, Latin Jazz, salsa, big band, blues, and also on the jazz beyond stage go a little bit more esoteric. Is it hip-hop? Is it jazz? Is it spoken word? It allows us to explore stuff and go out to the bleeding edges of the genre.
LJC: The group that you’ve got opening the Latin Jazz stage on Saturday is the San Jose Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble. I think that its incredible that you’ve got that educational component and you’re passing Latin Jazz onto another generation. Can you tell me a little bit about that group?
AR: That ensemble was one of my babies. I also founded the Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble of San Francisco with John Calloway; I helped managed it along with my wife. What makes it Latin Jazz? At the end of the day it’s really the rhythm section that adds that Latin flavor, so I’ve been feeding instruments. I’ve donated congas and timbales to La Peña for their Latin Jazz group and I donated instruments to the Mission Cultural Center and their Latin Jazz group came out of that. At the end of last year’s festival, I donated a set of congas and timbales to the organization in the hopes that they would launch a Latin Jazz group similar to the San Francisco group that I founded eight years ago. The nexus of it started with the donation of Latin Jazz gear, so that the kids had really professional, authentic instruments to play. It was also felt that because the Latin and salsa stages were so popular and the South Bay was so heavily Hispanic that besides having a jazz orchestra, if we had a Latin Jazz orchestra, then people would get behind it and the kids would really get excited about it. And that’s exactly what happened. So this year, it’s really all about developing that ensemble. Down the road, we’re hoping actually to be invited to a lot of different places, similar to what Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble of San Francisco does. When we founded the San Francisco Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble, it was all about passing on the Latin Jazz tradition and creating role models for other young musicians to see that this style of music was not only playable but possible for anyone with an interest to play. So in a similar fashion, we’re hoping that this young band will motivate other young musicians to explore the genre and get to know it better. I always say we’re doing human gardening. Flowers are people’s talents and abilities and so we’re literally growing that next generation of Bay Area Latin Jazz artists.
LJC: Filling up a lot of the Latin Jazz stage’s schedule are some of those mainstays of Bay Area Latin Jazz – John Santos, John Calloway, and Wayne Wallace. What would you say about the Bay Area Latin Jazz scene?
AR: It’s funny you should ask that. I get to work with folks from all over the world – musicians from the East Coast, I work with Latin Percussion as one of their events people, I board-chair two organizations, and I promoted music with Bill Martinez, who brought about 50 groups from Cuba in Latino Entertainment Partners – so I come at this from a lot of different ways. It always strikes me that whenever I’m speaking to New York musicians, they always comment, “Oh man, the Latin Jazz scene in the Bay Area is so vibrant and so happening.” But self-perception, if you were to ask that of the local musicians, they would say, “Not so. Not enough venues, not enough paying gigs, an economic decline . . .” So, if you really think about it, where Latin Jazz is being played, its kind of like a checkerboard of places. Some places are more salsa dance places than anything else. Other places might want to create a miracle by starting a four-week series and wonder why they don’t have 5,000 people knocking down their door for drinks.
The Bay Area from the sixties didn’t have the kind of Latin culture that New York or Miami had, so our folks actually left the Bay Area to study with masters in places like Cuba or New York. Or folks like Armando Peraza arrived here to bring that authenticity to the Bay Area. When John Santos, Calloway, and those guys were learning to play, there were no DVDs, there was no method book – you either learned from someone who knew it or you made it up. So I think the difference is that they really form a core of not only talented musicians, but also talented educators who really built up a next generation of Latin Jazz players. You know, I think of John Santos in relation to Javier Navarrette, the young conga player on the scene or drummer David Flores. They’re all grown up now and in their mid-thirties or forties, but I remember when they were all teenagers, looking, like fans do, at these great idols. So our opportunity is really just to keep the music flowing, keep this great American art form alive. I’m always struck by how the audience keeps aging. How many silver haired people there are bopping their heads. So the challenge for all of us is how can we not only educate a younger consumer playing this music and appreciating it, but also how can we create a renaissance of this music in the popular culture. And I think the secret is just ensure that this young generation knows the idiom and can play it. I think it starts there. You can’t control personal taste, but you can definitely control a person’s ability to play something.
LJC: On the other side of things, the salsa stage is a testament to how strong the Bay Area is in the world of Latin dance music. Groups like Karabali, Fito Reinoso, Vission Latina, and more – there’s a happening salsa scene here in the Bay Area. How would you address that?
AR: Dancing is its own art form. So the ability to combine two art forms – music and dance – just builds audience. By focusing on just a stage for dancers, we bring in a group of people that would be just as happy dancing to a jukebox or a CD. But there’s something very emotional about dancing to a band. Sometimes you play and the audience is a bunch of stiffs; other times the audience gives you so much energy and enthusiasm that the whole evening can take off and move into outer space. The salsa stage is recognition that both Latin Jazz and salsa is no longer just a thing for the Latin audience or a Spanish-speaking world. Living in San Francisco as I do, I can tell you that they dance salsa in China Town. Filipinos dance salsa. Germans dance salsa. I just got a CD from an Italian salsa band. So once again, our concerts allow people to learn and grow about music, as well as dance, and give them a forum to enjoy live. You know, the thing about the Western model of culture is often that there’s the performer and there’s the audience. Rarely is there any interaction or movement. In the case of Latin culture or salsa dancing, it really is a contact sport. I think that’s the difference between the Western model of culture versus ethnic models. In the Western model, you’re an audience and there’s a performer. In the World model, audience and performer are one. I grew up dancing starting when I was four or five as a young kid in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and I was dancing with my grandmother. To be able to share not only dance, but also similar songs and the vocabulary of this music - it goes back to the turn of the century. To know that these same songs were popular fifty years ago, forty years ago, thirty years ago, and they’re still just as vibrant and danceable today is pretty exciting.
LJC: Are there future plans to keep Latin Jazz in the mix for future San Jose Jazz Festivals?
AR: Obviously the economy has impacted the festival. We really should be cutting back; we’re taking a big organizational risk this year by even putting this on. As we discussed were we to cut, what would we cut, where would we widdle, salsa and Latin Jazz were never part of the discussion. Obviously, you’re not going to cut off the most popular ones, and also the ones that we feel are the most sponsorable in terms of the kind of audience that advertisers are looking for. I was the one that identified that we had the largest Latin Jazz festival on the West Coast – the festival inside a festival I called it. Speaking for me personally, I’d like to see us strip it out and maybe make it a Latin Jazz festival in its own right. Maybe have two separate festivals that are put together by the organization . . . but that’s just me talkin’!
The San Jose Jazz Festival offers some of the most extensive support for the Latin Jazz community found in festivals today. The three-day festival features nine stages full of constant music, drawing upon a combination of local and international talent. The festival includes a stage dedicated specifically to Latin Jazz and another stage reserved only for salsa bands. In addition, the festival regularly includes Latin Jazz artists upon their main stage and even sneaks Latin artists onto some of the side stages. They prioritize high quality music, drawing upon the deep roots of Latin Jazz and avoiding cheap imitations. The festival maintains a low price for admission, allowing an individual access to all nine stages for only $15 per day. The San Jose Jazz organization reaches out to the community and helps them understand the wealth of Latin Jazz talent in the Bay Area. They educate young people about the music through a Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble, making sure the genre reaches the next generation. In every way, the San Jose Jazz Festival sends a loud message that Latin Jazz is an important piece of the modern jazz world.
In an attempt to get the details behind the San Jose Jazz Festival and their outstanding support of Latin Jazz, I talked with San Jose Jazz’s Vice-Chairman Of The Board, Arturo Riera. An avid supporter of Latin Jazz, Riera advocates for the genre, but it’s not a difficult sell. San Jose Jazz provides fantastic support for Latin Jazz, as shown through their full integration of the style into the festival. Riera stays extensively involved in the greater Bay Area Latin Jazz community, giving him a keen insight into the overall artistic scene. In our conversation, Riera discusses the San Jose Jazz Festival, Bay Area Latin Jazz, youth in the genre, the importance of salsa, and much more. Enjoy!
Latin Jazz Corner: Maybe you could tell us a little bit about San Jose Jazz and your role in the group.
Arturo Riera: San Jose Jazz is actually a twenty-year-old organization. It began as a way of throwing a jazz concert down in San Jose. The first festival was actually put on peoples’ credit cards because they didn’t know if there would be sponsors around. Clearly over the last twenty years it has evolved. According to the city of San Jose, it is the only major tourist event of any value, in terms of attracting people to San Jose – if you think about why people might go there outside of business, the answer is hard to find. So the festival provides them an opportunity to showcase the city and the city’s downtown core. The million and a half roughly that we spend at the festival , generates about eighteen million in taxable income for the city. Also of late, over the last few years, both the San Jose Metro as well as the San Jose Business Journal have polled their users, basically asking them what’s their perception of the most important event in San Jose – some of the options that they were given were the San Jose Grand Prix when it was still around – and year after year, ours comes out as the best event. Whether you’re looking at a business type audience or whether you’re looking at just an entertainment crowd, people really love it.
So we see it as an opportunity to do a couple of things. One is to showcase the results of all our educational activities by providing young bands a place to play. Normally the way that you get to jazz is through a school program – a school jazz band or some kind of competitive band. We hold a San Jose Jazz Competition for bands in the Bay Area, so that educators get a chance to have their bands plays and also be rated by adjudicators. As a result, we can also then present a significant number of bands at our youth stage. So that’s a great way to showcase young talent. Some guys that are hitting the stage right now, like the Lebouf Brothers or some of the other young folks that are now making it on the scene actually came through our programs. So we’re very proud of that. The other thing that we do is showcase local artists and give them a venue that normally you’d have to leave the city or leave the country to get. You know, one of the things, especially on the Latin Jazz side, that musicians keep telling me is, “Oh my god, this is the best kept secret in the jazz world.” So whenever we’re able to bring in groups from Europe or New York or other places, they always are blown away by not only the quality of the venues, in terms of the level of the stages and the sound and the instruments that we provide, but also that it really takes over downtown in a way that I like to say makes San Jose a global capital for about 48 hours. You feel like you’re in New York or Paris, or Rome, because the city comes alive. For example, on Friday, we’re going to have a 48-hour jam session. We’re also working with downtown clubs to make sure that the club venues are playing jazz and presenting local music. So besides our nine stages this year, we also have gone deeply into the club community in San Jose to make sure that all the clubs are activated with jazz type activities. It goes from our stages to literally invigorating the whole downtown. The hotels and restaurants always tell us the same thing – “We always know it’s jazz week, because our business goes through the roof.”
The Latin Jazz and Salsa stages not only tend to be the most popular and well attended, but the more space we give them, the more people show. And so I would argue that the combination of Latin Jazz and Salsa stages match or beat the main stage crowds that we draw, just in terms of sheers numbers of people.
LJC: You really do have an emphasis upon Latin Jazz and Salsa, something that gets buried in other festivals. How did that become such a priority for the San Jose Festival?
AR: Well, I’ve been on the board almost six years and I think it was a priority long before I got there. They always had a Latin and a Salsa stage, and initially I think that their self-perception was that they were going to cater to a South Bay Hispanic crowd. I think it’s evident that Latin Jazz is part of a fabric of our popular culture – you hear it in commercials, you hear it all over the place. I think often the difficulty for a consumer is, “I love that, but where do I learn more about it? Who’s playing it? Where do I get to know more?” I sat in last Friday with John Calloway and made that statement to the crowd and heard, “Yea, that’s right!” and they were nodding their heads. So they festival allows us to educate as well as entertain about different flavors of jazz. Over the last four years, as a board member, and then board-chair, and now board vice-president, I’ll work very hard to put on the show and get funders and apply my PR and marketing skills to ensure its success, but the great pro-quo is that if we are going to present Latin Jazz, it has to be authentic, it has to be the real deal. It can’t be ear sauce. So over the past few years, they’ve actually allowed me to book those stages.
This year we’re trying to incorporate more Brazilian into the mix. The Brazilian community is growing here in the Bay Area and that allows us to address a different constituency. Between Forrofiando and SambaDa, we’ve got a little Brazilian for folks. I discovered last year in booking SambaDa, not only did they bring their own Santa Cruz audience that is passionate about them, but also that stage was really popular while they were there. People were dancing and singing. I go to a lot of these events, and you start to recognize a lot of people. But in this case, the Brazilian folks brought their own crowd. For us, it’s all about expanding the jazz tent and making sure that all the different colors are explored. This festival really allows us to push into the fringes of emerging jazz, young jazz, Latin Jazz, salsa, big band, blues, and also on the jazz beyond stage go a little bit more esoteric. Is it hip-hop? Is it jazz? Is it spoken word? It allows us to explore stuff and go out to the bleeding edges of the genre.
LJC: The group that you’ve got opening the Latin Jazz stage on Saturday is the San Jose Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble. I think that its incredible that you’ve got that educational component and you’re passing Latin Jazz onto another generation. Can you tell me a little bit about that group?
AR: That ensemble was one of my babies. I also founded the Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble of San Francisco with John Calloway; I helped managed it along with my wife. What makes it Latin Jazz? At the end of the day it’s really the rhythm section that adds that Latin flavor, so I’ve been feeding instruments. I’ve donated congas and timbales to La Peña for their Latin Jazz group and I donated instruments to the Mission Cultural Center and their Latin Jazz group came out of that. At the end of last year’s festival, I donated a set of congas and timbales to the organization in the hopes that they would launch a Latin Jazz group similar to the San Francisco group that I founded eight years ago. The nexus of it started with the donation of Latin Jazz gear, so that the kids had really professional, authentic instruments to play. It was also felt that because the Latin and salsa stages were so popular and the South Bay was so heavily Hispanic that besides having a jazz orchestra, if we had a Latin Jazz orchestra, then people would get behind it and the kids would really get excited about it. And that’s exactly what happened. So this year, it’s really all about developing that ensemble. Down the road, we’re hoping actually to be invited to a lot of different places, similar to what Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble of San Francisco does. When we founded the San Francisco Latin Jazz Youth Ensemble, it was all about passing on the Latin Jazz tradition and creating role models for other young musicians to see that this style of music was not only playable but possible for anyone with an interest to play. So in a similar fashion, we’re hoping that this young band will motivate other young musicians to explore the genre and get to know it better. I always say we’re doing human gardening. Flowers are people’s talents and abilities and so we’re literally growing that next generation of Bay Area Latin Jazz artists.
LJC: Filling up a lot of the Latin Jazz stage’s schedule are some of those mainstays of Bay Area Latin Jazz – John Santos, John Calloway, and Wayne Wallace. What would you say about the Bay Area Latin Jazz scene?
AR: It’s funny you should ask that. I get to work with folks from all over the world – musicians from the East Coast, I work with Latin Percussion as one of their events people, I board-chair two organizations, and I promoted music with Bill Martinez, who brought about 50 groups from Cuba in Latino Entertainment Partners – so I come at this from a lot of different ways. It always strikes me that whenever I’m speaking to New York musicians, they always comment, “Oh man, the Latin Jazz scene in the Bay Area is so vibrant and so happening.” But self-perception, if you were to ask that of the local musicians, they would say, “Not so. Not enough venues, not enough paying gigs, an economic decline . . .” So, if you really think about it, where Latin Jazz is being played, its kind of like a checkerboard of places. Some places are more salsa dance places than anything else. Other places might want to create a miracle by starting a four-week series and wonder why they don’t have 5,000 people knocking down their door for drinks.
The Bay Area from the sixties didn’t have the kind of Latin culture that New York or Miami had, so our folks actually left the Bay Area to study with masters in places like Cuba or New York. Or folks like Armando Peraza arrived here to bring that authenticity to the Bay Area. When John Santos, Calloway, and those guys were learning to play, there were no DVDs, there was no method book – you either learned from someone who knew it or you made it up. So I think the difference is that they really form a core of not only talented musicians, but also talented educators who really built up a next generation of Latin Jazz players. You know, I think of John Santos in relation to Javier Navarrette, the young conga player on the scene or drummer David Flores. They’re all grown up now and in their mid-thirties or forties, but I remember when they were all teenagers, looking, like fans do, at these great idols. So our opportunity is really just to keep the music flowing, keep this great American art form alive. I’m always struck by how the audience keeps aging. How many silver haired people there are bopping their heads. So the challenge for all of us is how can we not only educate a younger consumer playing this music and appreciating it, but also how can we create a renaissance of this music in the popular culture. And I think the secret is just ensure that this young generation knows the idiom and can play it. I think it starts there. You can’t control personal taste, but you can definitely control a person’s ability to play something.
LJC: On the other side of things, the salsa stage is a testament to how strong the Bay Area is in the world of Latin dance music. Groups like Karabali, Fito Reinoso, Vission Latina, and more – there’s a happening salsa scene here in the Bay Area. How would you address that?
AR: Dancing is its own art form. So the ability to combine two art forms – music and dance – just builds audience. By focusing on just a stage for dancers, we bring in a group of people that would be just as happy dancing to a jukebox or a CD. But there’s something very emotional about dancing to a band. Sometimes you play and the audience is a bunch of stiffs; other times the audience gives you so much energy and enthusiasm that the whole evening can take off and move into outer space. The salsa stage is recognition that both Latin Jazz and salsa is no longer just a thing for the Latin audience or a Spanish-speaking world. Living in San Francisco as I do, I can tell you that they dance salsa in China Town. Filipinos dance salsa. Germans dance salsa. I just got a CD from an Italian salsa band. So once again, our concerts allow people to learn and grow about music, as well as dance, and give them a forum to enjoy live. You know, the thing about the Western model of culture is often that there’s the performer and there’s the audience. Rarely is there any interaction or movement. In the case of Latin culture or salsa dancing, it really is a contact sport. I think that’s the difference between the Western model of culture versus ethnic models. In the Western model, you’re an audience and there’s a performer. In the World model, audience and performer are one. I grew up dancing starting when I was four or five as a young kid in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and I was dancing with my grandmother. To be able to share not only dance, but also similar songs and the vocabulary of this music - it goes back to the turn of the century. To know that these same songs were popular fifty years ago, forty years ago, thirty years ago, and they’re still just as vibrant and danceable today is pretty exciting.
LJC: Are there future plans to keep Latin Jazz in the mix for future San Jose Jazz Festivals?
AR: Obviously the economy has impacted the festival. We really should be cutting back; we’re taking a big organizational risk this year by even putting this on. As we discussed were we to cut, what would we cut, where would we widdle, salsa and Latin Jazz were never part of the discussion. Obviously, you’re not going to cut off the most popular ones, and also the ones that we feel are the most sponsorable in terms of the kind of audience that advertisers are looking for. I was the one that identified that we had the largest Latin Jazz festival on the West Coast – the festival inside a festival I called it. Speaking for me personally, I’d like to see us strip it out and maybe make it a Latin Jazz festival in its own right. Maybe have two separate festivals that are put together by the organization . . . but that’s just me talkin’!
