Full houses greet ’23 Tucson Jazz Fest

Nearly every seat was taken at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall on Saturday, when the 13-member multigenre, multilingual Pink Martini with China Forbes joined about 40 members of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra.

The next night, there were only a handful of empty seats at Fox Tucson Theatre when jazz piano phenom Matthew Whitaker made his Tucson debut; the hometown Tucson Jazz Institute’s award-winning Ellington Big Band opened the show.

They were among the big events of the opening weekend, which featured nine shows including the kickoff concert on Friday, Jan. 13, with saxophonist Joshua Redman at Centennial Hall. 

In the Music Hall on Saturday night, Pink Martini’s longtime vocalist Forbes, who last summer won the Montreal Jazz Festival’s prestigious Ella Fitzgerald Award, took the audience around the world in 90 minutes. She and the ensemble’s other vocalists — singer-songwriter Edna Vazquez from Mexico, “America’s Got Talent” alumni Jimmie Herrod of Pink Martini’s home base of Portland, Oregon, and longtime Pink Martini percussionist and vocalist Timothy Nishimoto — sang songs in Spanish, Armenian, French, German, Turkish and Japanese.

Many in the audience likely understood what Vasquez was singing with “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas,” but it’s a safe bet not many had a clue what Nishimoto was singing in the energetic “Zundoko-bushi,” which featured the TSO’s newly seated principal percussionist Trevor Barroero on flexatone. Just because they couldn’t sing along didn’t stop the audience from doing a little chair dancing.

Pink Martini set the party tone for the festival, which was no surprise for the fans filling the nearly 2,300-seat Music Hall. They came expecting high-energy songs from the 28-year-old band, including its signature French hit “Sympathique” (Je ne veux pas travailler), their versions of the Brazilian hits “Amado Mio” and “Brazil,” and the band’s original ditties “Hey Eugene” and “Hang on Little Tomato,” which sounded bigger and bolder with the TSO’s wonderful backing.

The band slowed it down a couple times; Vazquez sang her original heartbreaking song honoring the world’s indigenous people, and Forbes sat at the piano to play her latest solo single, “Full Circle,” which she wrote during the pandemic lockdown.

At the end of the concert, Pink Martini founder/band leader/pianist Thomas Lauderdale introduced every member of the TSO by name as well as guest conductor Evan Roider.

On Sunday, Whitaker also shined a spotlight on Tucson talent, inviting six members of the Tucson Jazz Institute’s award-winning Ellington Big Band to accompany him for three songs. 

You could tell by the smiles that swallowed their faces that these young players — trombonist Diego Jaquez, trumpeters Matt Leal and Oskar Anderson and saxophonists Jonas Heidebrecht, Ethan Luker and Matias Straub — were living out a dream on the Fox Tucson Theatre stage. They were swaying along when Whitaker played, scaling the keys of the piano and an electronic keyboard that sat on the piano so fast that his fingers were a blur. 

It was the second time Sunday night that the Ellington crew had been on the Fox stage. They and the rest of the big band, under the direction of Tucson Jazz Institute co-founder Brice Winston, played a stunningly good 45-minute set that had the audience cheering. One older woman near us was shocked when her companion told her the group was high school students. Surely a group this good, she told her friend, had to be from the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music. 

Whitaker is not much older than the Ellington Big Band members he invited on stage. The 21-year-old Juilliard senior, though, played with the temperament and technical finesse of an old jazz soul possessed by the spirit of a true Gen Z’er, alternating between his twin piano/keyboard setup and a Hammond organ set close enough that Whitaker, who has been blind since birth, could easily turn on his bench to play both.

For most of the 90-minute performance, he played the piano and keyboard, adding an electronica vibe at times and balancing the melody and harmony between the two instruments to the point that you could swear you were hearing two people playing.  

His setlist beckoned to the jazz gods — Chick Corea’s “Spain,” Ellington’s “Garden Wall,” his mentor Dr. Lonnie Smith’s gospel-tinged soul-jazz organ piece “Pilgrimage” — and showcased his own composing talents — the spirited “Journey Uptown” and the pleading “Stop Fighting,” which Whitaker punctuated at the end with a verbal plea for everyone to put aside their differences and stop fighting.

Whitaker’s Gen Z came shining through with jazzed-up covers of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.”

The jazz festival continued on Monday with the Downtown Jazz Festival, which was moved from its outdoor venue to “rained in” venues at Club Congress and the Century Room at Hotel Congress and the Rialto Theatre. The festival continues through Sunday, Jan. 22. See tucsonjazzfestival.org for showtimes and details.