As a live performance medium, jazz, more than any other musical genre, lives in — and for — the moment.
Whether on a concert stage, in an amphitheater or nightclub, or anywhere in between, jazz is a real-time experience that can and often does change in an instant. It is a music whose performances command attentive listening, but are also built on the interaction between musicians and their listeners.
An audience’s spontaneous responses — to an entire song, a solo, a unison instrumental passage, an improvisational filigree or the spur-of-the-moment interplay between band members — can help propel a concert higher, making it a truly unique experience for all involved.
But what happens when, unthinkable as it may seem, a jazz performance is loudly and repeatedly disrupted by one or more audience members?
Until this fall, that is a question I had never pondered, simply because I had never before encountered any jazz hecklers — for lack of a better term — at any of the many concerts I’ve attended.
Alas, heckling is precisely what a near-capacity audience experienced at guitar legend Pat Metheny’s often sublime Oct. 28 solo concert at The Magnolia in El Cajon. Whether the front-row center couple in question was obliviously conversing and constantly moving in their seats, deliberately jeering, drunk or sober, is still unclear.
Some attendees who contacted me and sat near the couple were adamant that the man and woman were intoxicated. That view was shared by Metheny’s tour manager, who — from his perch backstage facing the audience — could hear and see them face to face.
A few other attendees, who also sat near the front row, told me they thought one or both members of the couple sounded and acted as if they were on the autism spectrum. These concertgoers speculated that the couple, a middle-aged man and woman, were simply expressing their enthusiasm for the music, unaware that doing so while Metheny was performing was rude to both him and the audience at large.
Pat Metheny, a 20-time Grammy Award-winner, will perform a solo concert Saturday at The Magnolia in El Cajon. He is shown here at his Oct. 6 Kentucky concert in Louisville.
(Stephen J. Cohen / Getty Images)
Whatever the reason, the couple was so loud that I could hear them quite clearly — over the music — even from eight rows behind them. Friends seated 10 or so rows behind me also heard the couple. The pair’s high-volume behavior was so disruptive that an increasingly dismayed Metheny stopped his performance several times.
He did so first in stunned disbelief, then to express aloud his understandable frustration, and — 90 minutes into the concert — to ask the audience what to do. Their near-unanimous response led to the man and woman in question being escorted out of the concert by nearby security guards. Why those guards, who had stood nearby throughout the concert, did not once asked the offending couple to lower their voices remains a mystery.
As disheartening and annoying as this experience was, it made me appreciate how much I take it for granted that jazz concertgoers typically strike a near-perfect balance between attentiveness and enthusiasm. Or, as San Diego sax great Charles McPherson, likes to tell audiences: “Jazz fans are just a little bit smarter than other people.”
My favorite jazz concerts of 2023 all benefited from audiences who listened as intently as the musicians who were performing. Happily, San Diego offers an array of venues for those performances to take place.
In La Jolla, the Athenaeum’s renowned jazz series — curated since its inception by Daniel Atkinson — celebrated its 39th anniversary with a globe-spanning lineup of established and rising artists. The Athenaeum also resumed its 28-year-old concert series at TSRI Auditorium with standout performances by Regina Carter and Etienne Charles.
A few blocks away, La Jolla Music Society presented the debut concerts here by the multi-Grammy Award-winning Maria Schneider Orchestra and by 22-year-old piano and organ virtuoso Matthew Whitaker.
The all-ages Dizzy’s in Bay Park turned 23 this year and hosted the debut area concert by guitar wizard Pasquale Grasso and the first concert anywhere by 14-year-old sax dynamo Kahlil Childs and his new quintet. Nationally acclaimed El Cajon pianist Joshua White performed at Dizzy’s several times with his trio.
The members of jazz sxophonist Kahlil Childs’ new band range in age from 14 to 17. They are, from left, Rhydian Marshall, Kahlil Childs, Malik Minert and Luke Little.
(eeman agrama minert
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Trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos celebrated his ninth anniversary hosting concerts and weekly jam sessions at Balboa Park’s Panama 66, while his Young Lions Jazz Academy at Liberty Station marked its sixth anniversary. It was also the sixth year of his role as jazz curator for the San Diego Symphony, which — sadly — only featured Castellanos at one of its summer concerts at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park.
In November, top flutist Holly Hofmann marked the first anniversary of her free weekly Sunday afternoon jazz concerts and jam sessions at Tio Leo’s in Bay Park. The lineup mixed top San Diego area talents with such nationally noted musicians as drummer Jeff Hamilton and guitarist Bruce Forman. Her husband, esteemed pianist Mike Wofford, was inducted into the San Diego Music Hall of Fame in November.
In Rolando, the Jazz Lounge celebrated its second anniversary as a live music venue. It is owned and operated by leading San Diego singer Leonard Patton, whose talent roster this year included longtime James Taylor band keyboardist Larry Goldings and his trio.
Radio station KSDS Jazz 88.3 FM in August resumed its “Jazz Live” concert broadcasts from the station’s home at San Diego City College, where it kicked back into gear with a memorable performance by Charlies McPherson and Gilbert Castellanos.
It was a welcome return for “Jazz Live,” which had been on hiatus since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic shutdown. But the national award-winning station seemed strangely muted this year in celebrating its 50th anniversary of jazz programming.
In a major loss, devoted San Diego jazz critic Robert Bush died Oct. 19 — less than two weeks after his 65th birthday — following his heroic battle against esophageal cancer. Rob’s tireless writing over the years for San Diego Troubadour, San Diego Reader and other publications provided an invaluable chronicle of the jazz scene here and its artists and presenters.
I last saw Rob at the Sept. 21 Don Byron Quartet concert at UC San Diego’s Park & Market, where prominent musician friends embraced him warmly. Their music elevated him, at least in part, even in his final days. Rob wrote with great insight and tenderness about living with — and dying from — cancer, and his final essay was posthumously published in the Union-Tribune last month.
Without further ado, these were 10 of my favorite San Diego jazz concerts in 2023.
American composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton this fall performed his first San Diego concert since the 1980s. It was a solo saxophone recital that was breathtaking, literally and figuratively.
(Ramin Talaie / Corbis via Getty Images)
1. Anthony Braxton, Oct. 1, UC San Diego’s Conrad Prebys Concert Hall — It had been nearly four decades since this pioneering saxophonist, composer and band leader last played here. His return — co-presented by ArtPower and the UC San Diego Department of Music — was breathtaking, literally and figuratively. Braxton, now 78, delivered a solo concert that was a marvel of skill, ingenuity, technical command and deep, deep emotion.
2. Diana Krall, July 22, Humphreys Concerts by the Bay — Appearing just two days after the death of vocal icon Tony Bennett, her erstwhile collaborator, Krall dedicated her entire performance to him. Her version of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” sung with exceptional pathos, was further heightened by Anthony Wilson’s wonderfully nuanced guitar solo.
3. Regina Carter & Xavier Davis, Sept. 17, Athenaeum Jazz at TSRI Auditorium— One of the leading violinists of her time, Carter teamed with pianist Davis for an evening of near-telepathic duets. Their playing was alternately joyous and poignant, elegant and earthy, rousing and rhapsodic. And their concert marked the long-overdue return of the august Athenaeum Jazz at TSRI series, which resumed for the first time since the pandemic-fueled shutdown of live events in 2021.
4. Pat Metheny, Oct. 28, The Magnolia — Performing solo on an array of acoustic and electric guitars, Metheny wove a mesmerizing six-string musical web — despite being repeatedly distracted by a loudly obtrusive couple in the front row.
5. Charles McPherson & Gilbert Castellanos, Sept. 9, The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park — Who better to salute the timeless music of bebop pioneers Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie than this dynamic San Diego duo, whose stellar quintet for this concert included ace pianist Gerald Clayton?
6. Maria Schneider Orchestra, March 5, La Jolla Music Society’s Baker-Baum Concert Hall
7. Etienne Charles, Dec. 10, Athenaeum Jazz at TSRI
8. Don Byron Quartet, Sept. 21, UC San Diego’s Park & Market
9. Gregory Porter, The Gilbert Castellanos Quartet, Aug. 18, UC San Diego’s Epstein Family Amphitheater
10. Samara Joy, March 19, La Jolla Music Society’s The Jai