Making Williamstown "Jazztown"
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 05, 1999) -- You can't miss it if you drive anywhere through the streets of this college town. Williamstown, the banners declare, is JazzTown.

Come again?

Previously known for its world-famous summer theater, art museums and the elite liberal-arts college whose name it bears, Williamstown is hoping that next weekend's jazz festival will add some pizzazz to the town's reputation as an oasis of high culture in Northern Berkshire.

Along the way, if JazzTown '99 attracts some out-of-towners to the Village Beautiful during mud season, the Williamstown Chamber of Commerce, which is co-presenting the festival with Williams College, won't complain.

But for music fans, JazzTown '99 potentially represents the biggest thing to happen to jazz in the Berkshires since Tanglewood carved out Labor Day weekend for its annual jazz festival.

The Mingus Big Band will headline the Williamstown Jazz Festival next Friday, April 9, at 8 p.m. in Chapin Hall. Tickets are $20; $8 with a Williams ID.

The festival kicks off the night before on Thursday at 8 in Chapin Hall with the Ted Rosenthal Trio. Tickets are $5; free with a Williams ID. The festival continues on Friday when the 8th annual Collegiate Jazz Festival, featuring bands from a dozen schools around New England playing for adjudication hourly, takes place from noon to 5 in Chapin Hall, and again on Saturday from noon to 6. Admission is free.

On Saturday night from 6 to 9:30, Williams College alumni musicians will spread out throughout town and perform at various locations, including the 1896 House, the Main Street Café and the Water Street Grill. At 10 p.m., they and others will congregate back on campus at Goodrich Hall for an intergenerational alumni jam session, to which admission is free.

The festival continues on Sunday morning with a jazz brunch at the Orchards featuring the Dixieland sounds of the Charles River Stompers from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The weekend program concludes on Sunday at 2 p.m. in Chapin Hall with a concert featuring the Art Lande and Bruce Williamson Duo and the Joe Mulholland Sextet. Lande is a member of the Williams class of '69; Mulholland graduated from Williams in 1974. Admission is $5; free with a Williams ID.

For more ticket information call the Williamstown Chamber of Commerce at 458-9077 or the Williams concert manager at 597-2736.

The festival will also include a lecture by noted jazz critic and author Tom Piazza, Williams class of '76, whose books include "The Guide to Recorded Jazz" and "Blues Up and Down: Jazz in Our Time." Piazza will speak at Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall on Saturday at 11 a.m. Nichole Rustin, the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams, is writing a book on Charles Mingus, and she will speak about the late musician/composer at Brooks-Rogers on Friday at 6 p.m. Both lectures are free.

"First and foremost, we wanted to bring a broad range of musical styles within the jazz idiom to the campus," said Andrew F. Jaffe, artist-in-residence in jazz at Williams, who programmed the festival's lineup. "The incubator for jazz seems to be more the campus than the nightclub these days, so we are careful to choose musicians to perform or to be adjudicators who are sensitive to student needs," said Jaffe, who also directs the student jazz ensemble at Williams.

Jaffe said that the planning for the event represented an "impressive" effort bringing together students, faculty and townspeople. The JazzTown '99 Advisory Council includes names of local businessmen, executives and cultural figures. The Williamstown Savings Bank, South Adams Savings Bank and Hoosac Bank are among those providing sponsorship for the festival.

In addition, the local chamber scored a $25,000 grant from the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism to help promote the festival -- twice what the National Music Foundation in Lenox receives to fund its annual Berkshire Music Festival next month. The chamber has been running ads for the festival in national publications, including the New York Times.

Jaffe underscores the alumni aspect of the event. According to an article Jaffe wrote for the Williams Alumni Review last fall, Williams has a long history of jazz dating back to the 1920s, when campus-based ensembles such as the Purple Knights and the Purple Pirates performed throughout New England.

In the wake of the Dixieland revival, the Spring Street Stompers gained fame in the 1950s through appearances on the Tonight Show and recordings for the Jubilee and Columbia record labels.

In the '60s and '70s, several Williams graduates went on to gain recognition in the jazz world, including Art Lande, whom Jaffe calls "one of the preeminent pianists in contemporary jazz,"and Joe Mulholland, who teaches at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

In more recent years, some of Jaffe's students in the jazz ensemble have gone on to careers in jazz, including Mark Sutton, class of '93, whose band, the Motion Poets, has recorded two CDs. (Sutton will take part in the Saturday night festival program).

Jaffe said it is hard to keep track of who among the Williams alumni are jazz musicians. "There is no systematic way of identifying them," he said, adding that at the Saturday night alumni jam session, "People might come out of the woodwork that I don't even know of."

The Mingus Big Band, overseen by Sue Mingus, the widow of Charles Mingus, is dedicated to performing the repertoire of the late bassist/composer, who was also an author, visionary and outspoken cultural and political figure. The 14-piece band has performed every Thursday since 1991 at The Fez under the Time Café in New York's East Village, and toured extensively throughout Europe and the U.S. Two of its four recordings have been nominated for Grammy Awards, and the group is perennially named "Best Big Band" in readers and critics polls in Downbeat and Jazz Times magazines. At the 1997 Grammy ceremony, Mingus was posthumously given NARAS's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1993, he became the first African-American to have his works acquired by the Library of Congress. He has also been honored with a commemorative U.S. postage stamp.

Since Ted Rosenthal won first prize in the second annual Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano competition, he has recorded five CDs as a leader. Among the well-known figures with which he has recorded are such jazz greats as Ron Carter, Billy Higgins, Eddie Gomez and Tom Harrell. Rosenthal toured for over three years with the last Gerry Mulligan Quartet, and recorded three CDs with the late composer/saxophonist. He is also the founder and musical director of the Gerry Mulligan All-Star Tribute Band, featuring Bob Brookmeyer, Randy Brecker and Nick Brignola. He has also performed with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band and the Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. Rosenthal has appeared on Marian McPartland's "Piano Jazz" program on National Public Radio and David Sanborn's "Night Music" on NBC-TV. His trio includes bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Yoron Israel.

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[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on April 9, 1999. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1999. All rights reserved.]