Monterey Jazz Festival

Monterey County Fairgrounds

Monterey, Calif.

September 19-21

The Monterey Jazz Festival is the longest running jazz festival in the world, and one reason for its continuing relevance is its adventurous booking. Since 1958, it has brought many jazz legends to the Monterey Fairgrounds in addition to acts that are from outside that world including Big Brother and the Holding Company and Jefferson Airplane in the 1960s to Pete Seeger and Los Lobos more recently.

For its 57^th outing, the jazz festival brought back some classic headliners (Herbie Hancock, Charles Lloyd) along with a healthy dose of new talent. Saturday’s afternoon and evening lineup exemplified the jazz festival’s bold booking with sets by Booker T. Jones, Gary Clark Jr. and The Roots. During Booker T’s set, the Southern soul legend got out from behind his organ and regaled the crowd with a story about seeing Jimi Hendrix’s legendary Monterey Pop Festival performance on the same stage. As a tribute to that moment, he strapped on a guitar to play and sing Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” with his four-piece backing band including the outstanding Vernon Black on guitar.

Next up was Gary Clark Jr., the touted heir to Hendrix’s mind warping blues-rock. Clark opted not to touch his Hendrix/Albert Collins mash-up of “Third Stone From the Sun/If You Love Me Like You Say.” Instead, he focused on other songs from his major label debut Blak and Blu. The standout song by miles was “When My Train Pulls In,” which reached a truly transcendent peak with an epic guitar solo by Clark that compelled the crowd to get up out of their seats and shower the stage with applause.

But it was the booking of The Roots as the first ever hip hop band to headline a night on the Monterey Jazz Festival’s main stage that was the fest’s biggest booking risk that paid the biggest dividends. There were a few older jazz fans that walked out, but there were lots of younger, energized first timers at the Saturday evening set. At first, the eight piece band had so much going on that they sounded a bit overstuffed, but eventually, they locked into potent grooves on signature songs “You Got Me” and “The Seed (2.0).” They even pulled out a “Sweet Child O’ Mine”/”Bad to the Bone”/”Who Do You Love?” medley that probably marked the first and last time Guns ‘N Roses would ever be covered at the fest. It was a performance that proved the Monterey Jazz Festival should stay relevant far into the future.