Festival Keeps Good Times, Music Rolling

Though the temperature was peaking at more than 100 degrees and the humidity felt equally high, singer Barbara Morrison was able to get the Long Beach Jazz Festival’s crowd of 9,000 to sweat a little more Sunday as they danced, waved their hands and shouted encouragement to her raunchy claim in song “I know how to do it. . . .”

The three-day festival could make a similar claim. Without artistic or genre pretensions, its formula seems based on a single dictum: Let the good times roll.

Set between the city’s convention center and Shoreline Drive, Rainbow Lagoon Park played host Friday night to singer Michael Franks, drummer Alphonse Mouzon and guitarist Peter White and on Saturday to singers Etta James and Ernie Andrews, pianist Gene Harris, bassist Stanley Clarke and others.

On Sunday, the park was a jazz encampment, with acres of beach blankets, lawn chairs and umbrellas established around the lagoon and the sun-baked VIP seating in front of the stage. Security personnel estimated that several hundred people were waiting when the main gates opened at noon, two hours before the first note was struck, so that they could stake out the best spots.

The park’s walkways served as socializing centers, as did the large gathering of vendors, where items ranging from catfish and lemonade to straw hats, CDs and jazz T-shirts were being hawked. In the late afternoon, the lagoon filled with pedal boats. Frequently, the music served only as background for this nine-hour party.

But often, music served as its focus. Morrison’s performance, backed by drummer and festival founder Al Williams and his Jazz Society with exuberant trumpeter Nolan Shaheed and pianist Clarence McDonald, roused the audience with mainstream pleasures in the heat of the day. Saxophonist Ronnie Laws made a case for hard fusion with strong beats and over-the-top tenor play. Keyboardist David Benoit hit a note with the crowd when he dropped hints of Henry Mancini’s theme from “Peter Gunn” in his James Bond-inspired tune “Shaken, Not Stirred.”

After dark, trumpeter-percussionist-pianist Arturo Sandoval turned up the heat with his Cuban-fired, Dizzy Gillespie-inspired bebop. Singer Nancy Wilson, in particularly fine and expressive voice, revisited hits from her long career. Few in the crowd left before Wilson’s closing set ended at 11 p.m.