Audiences obliged the second Bellevue Jazz Festival, showing up in respectable and consistent numbers over Memorial Day weekend in venues large and small — making an encouraging case for the state of jazz patronage on the Eastside and in Greater Seattle.
Designed to be a big, high impact, civic ritual befitting a burgeoning metropolis, the three-day Bellevue Jazz Festival met its intentions on an important front, delivering an impressive density of jazz performances and the crowds expected of a large-scale event.
Friday’s headliner Dianne Reeves, a widely celebrated singer with the celebrity heft and the hardware (four Grammy Awards) to carry a big-money jazz festival, performed with just two guitarists, Russell Malone on electric guitar, Romero Lubambo on acoustic, providing a new context to a voice that is as pure and pitch-perfect as they come.
Designed to be a big, high impact, civic ritual befitting a burgeoning metropolis, the three-day Bellevue Jazz Festival met its intentions on an important front, delivering an impressive density of jazz performances and the crowds expected of a large-scale event.
Friday’s headliner Dianne Reeves, a widely celebrated singer with the celebrity heft and the hardware (four Grammy Awards) to carry a big-money jazz festival, performed with just two guitarists, Russell Malone on electric guitar, Romero Lubambo on acoustic, providing a new context to a voice that is as pure and pitch-perfect as they come.
