The debut edition of the San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival — which opened Friday night at California Center for the Arts, Escondido, and continues today and tomorrow with free outdoor concerts in Tijuana and the Gaslamp Quarter — is unique in at least two ways.
The first jazz festival to take place in the neighboring cities that straddle the border between the United States and Mexico, it is billed as: “Three days. Two countries. One world of musical artistry.”
It is also the first anywhere to be launched with seed money from Qualcomm co-founder Irwin M. Jacobs, who has long been one of the most generous arts philanthropists in the nation. The festival is dedicated to the memory of his equally generous wife, Joan, who passed away in May.
Jacobs was in attendance at Friday’s kick-off concert at the multitiered Escondido concert hall. It featured drum dynamo Cindy Blackman Santana and her band, the Gilbert Castellanos All-Star Sextet, solo pianist Gerald Clayton, and singer Magos Herrera and her band, who were elegantly accompanied on some numbers by San Diego’s Hausmann Quartet.
True to the festival’s international designation, the four-act lineup featured a suitably diverse array of styles and approaches. The performers included natives of Mexico (trumpeter Castellanos and percussionist Charlie Chavez), Brazil (guitarist Vinicius Gomes and drummer Alex Kautz) Cuba (drummer Ignacio Berroa), France (guitarist Aurelien Budynek), Italy (bassist Luca Alemanno) and across the United States (saxophonist Karl Denson is an Orange County native, while drummer Cindy Blackman Santana is from Ohio).
Versatile vocalist Magos Herrera, a Mexico City native based in New York, opened Friday’s concert with a 10-song set that found her singing in Spanish, English and Portuguese. She was quick to underscore the festival’s cultural and geographic significance.
“We are so proud to be a part of such a strong statement of diplomacy… that takes place in both the U.S. and Mexico,” she told the audience of 852, before contemplating aloud the purpose of borders.
Herrera then dedicated her third song of the night, the classic Chilean ballad, “Gracias a la Vida” (“Thanks to Life”), to festival mastermind Daniel Atkinson “for planting this seed.”
Atkinson has expertly curated the La Jolla Athenaeum’s ongoing jazz series since its inception in 1989 and its Athenaeum Jazz at TSRI series since 1996. After starting his nonprofit San Diego Jazz Ventures in 2020, he last year teamed with veteran Tijuana jazz and blues concert producer Julian Plascencia to begin work on their new cross-borders festival.
The two received a major boost from Jacobs. The longtime benefactor of the San Diego Symphony has given $400,000 in seed money to help fund the first three years of the San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival. Judging by the performances at Friday’s carefully constructed opening concert, that donation is already yielding a strong artistic return.
Herrera sang with supple grace throughout. She imbued each of her selections with deep feeling, no matter what language the lyrics were in, shining equally with Brazilian sambas (“Obra Filhia”), jazz-funk (“Aire”) and Mexican son jarocho (her set-closing “Healer”). Gomes, her guitarist, was a quiet marvel of musical taste and dexterity.
Clayton, who has stood out in both headlining and supporting roles at a number of Atkinson’s Athenaeum concerts, did so again on Friday. He was commissioned by the festival to compose a homage to New Orleans jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, who lived and worked in Tijuana in the early 1920s.
Clayton’s 36-minute “Tribute to Jelly Roll Morton” was a solo piano tour de force. Impeccably crafted, it incorporated blues, gospel, swing, ragtime, classical, bolero and more, along with recorded segments from an interview with Morton, who died in 1941 at the age of 50.
Trumpeter Castellanos, a San Diego jazz mainstay since the 1990s, assembled a talent-rich band for Friday’s concert. It included Clayton, bassist Alemanno, percussionist Chavez and former Dizzy Gillespie drum ace Berroa. Also on board was tenor saxophonist and flutist Karl Denson, who leads the funk-jazz band Tiny Universe and, since 2014, has been a touring member of the Rolling Stones.
Denson sounded positively liberated playing Latin-jazz classics with the Castellanos-led band, and his rich, creamy sax solos on Wayne Shorter’s “Armageddon” and Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Tin Tin Deo” were highlights of the night. He was matched note for note by the audacious Castellanos, Alemanno’s sublime bass playing and the charged drum and congas duets by Berroa and Chavez.
The music Friday stumbled only with the hurried closing performance by Blackman Santana, a jazz veteran best known for her drum work in the pioneering Latin-rock band led by her famed husband, former Tijuana guitarist Carlos Santana.
Her set began eight minutes after the concert’s previously announced 10 p.m. closing time and she was limited to 45 minutes, about half as long as she usually performs. Blackman Santana responded by having her four-man band quickly segue from one selection to another, without pausing in between. As a result, neither the musicians nor the audience had time to catch their breath, especially since most of the unannounced segments were up-tempo and delivered at a breakneck pace.
To further compound matters, Blackman Santana’s charged drumming was often buried even though her own audio engineer was doing the sound mix. Her music Friday often referenced Miles Davis in his “Bitches Brew” period, the 1975 album “The New Tony Williams Lifetime” and the work of the seminal fusion-jazz band Weather Report. (Blackman Santana’s bassist, Felix Pastorius, is the son of former Weather Report bassist Jaco Pastorius and his playing was very much like his father’s.)
Of course, bumps occur at new and established festivals alike. Apart from Blackman Santana’s marred headlining set, the opening night of the San Diego Tijuana Jazz Festival was impressive enough to suggest this budding event’s return next year won’t come a moment too soon.