Clinton St. Quarterly a limo rolled up carrying Friday night’s Sonny Rollins T he sun hadn’t yet gone down on the hot August evening, cable TV personnel with furrowed brows hustled around nests of wires carrying walkie-talkies, and festival organizers backstage were worn and tight-lipped. The oval of M Hood Community College’s 11,000 capacity stadium looked impressive from the grandstands, with the gray rows of 7,000 folding chairs stretching across the grass in front of a stage large enough to accommodate towering stacks of speakers, light and camera scaffolding, several drum sets, and a whole jazz band. The festival logo, with JAZZ in big glittering letters, hung as a backdrop, and a beautiful blue roof stretched calmly fifty feet above it. Out on the grass, where groups of people reclined on blankets with picnic dinners while others sprawled comfortably in the half-full reserved seats, a diffuse excitement was in the air. Motor homes that served as the musicians’ dressing rooms were lined up behind the chainlink fence separating the audience from the backstage area, and a cloud of form — must compete as a musical commodity along with many other styles, it is notable that jazz has managed, to a significant extent, to remain stubbornly outside the influence of market factors. Through the years there has persisted a jazz tradition, based on a loosely shared set of values that are passed on from one musician to another, that shapes the music as much as the demands of the market do. Jazz is a part of that great underground culture that surges to the surface from time to time to challenge and influence popular entertainment forms; there has always been a tension between the need for jazz performers to alter their music to fit the demands of the market and their desire to adjust the market to suit their music. When the Gresham Chamber of Commerce, looking for an image- building event that would do for their community what the Shakespearean Festival did for Ashland, chose to promote a jazz festival with a $250,000 budget, the aspiration of jazz players to move the market to their music dust appeared beyond them whenever headliners. This was the first major-league jazz festival ever held In Oregon, the first of its size and ambition most of the crowd had ever attended, and we were all ready for something magnificent and grand from a schedule featuring artists of international repute and billed as “The Birth of a Legend.’’ As Ralph Gleason said about the Monterey Jazz Festival — to whose stature the Mt. Hood Festival aspires — “The point of a festival is to be festive. To give and to receive joy . .. but above all the opportunity to see and to hear great artists in a great setting — that is the festival.” We were expecting to be moved, we were hungry for this music in Oregon, and for three days we had the chance to leap into the mainstream of the jazz tradition and be swept up in a celebration of its continuing power to truthfully express emotion. “The jazz player may be the last American hero,” critic Gary Giddins suggests, because “he has to fight for his sound, his vision and his tradition.” In an economy in which jazz music — America’s only original art
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