PREVIOUS SUCCESS GIVES JAZZ FEST A HEAD START

The Los Angeles Classic Jazz Festival, held for the first time over last Labor Day weekend, was, against all cynical expectations, a thumping, wailing success--except for the balance sheet, a minor matter if the choruses soar.

As many as 10,000 jazz fans attended, vividly garbed now and again, listening to 28 organized bands and 35 all-stars, some of them playing beside the swimming pool (which led to some close dancing in the shallow end). The music went on from Friday afternoon through Monday afternoon, with only minimal time out for sleep, nourishment and other interruptions.

The host hotel, the Airport Marriott, ran low on food by Sunday and had to rush in truckloads from other local hotels in the chain, a fact so pleasing to the Marriott that it dislodged a previously booked convention to get the Classic Jazz Festival back for a second running this Labor Day.

The festival, sponsored by the United Jazz Clubs of Southern California, a consortium of eight groups, with Chuck Conklin of Jazz Forum as the chief organizer, worrier and booker, has presently signed up 21 bands and 23 all-stars. These celebrated figures include such surviving legends as (Wild) Bill Davison, back again; sax men Bud Freeman (like Wild Bill, crowding 80) and Eddie Miller and the younger virtuosa of the double-belled euphonium, Betty O’Hara.

Among the local bands in attendance will be the Golden Eagle Jazz Band with its barefoot vocalist Chris Norris, who doubles as an English teacher at San Diego State, and the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band under trombonist-actor Conrad Janis, with the well-known comedy writer Sheldon Keller on bass and actor George Segal as the drop-in banjoist.

I stopped by Mischa’s on Sunset Boulevard the other evening, where the Unlisted is performing on Monday and Tuesday nights, and it struck me, not for the first time, that there is still room in the firmament for “Weary Blues” and even the several millionth telling of “Muskrat Ramble,” as well as the thoughtful ballads of Sting and Springsteen.

The Classic Jazz Festival, unlike some of the others, is strictly a volunteer, nonprofit operation with very little commercial support, although Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who was once a sideman with Benny Goodman, is a booster, and Local 47 of the musicians union has been very cooperative.

But “traditional jazz is not a hot commodity with sponsors,” Chuck Conklin says sadly. “We depend on audience support, and I think, or hope, there was enough momentum generated last year to give us a head start this time.”

Conklin, the cornet-playing leader of the Angel City Jazz Band, is by vocation a sound engineer on the “Cheers” television series. He made his musical debut marching in the New Year’s Day Mummers Parade in Philadelphia with the Hobo Band from his native Pitman, N.J. While still in high school he formed a dance band playing swing arrangements, but was converted to the New Orleans tradition, he explains, when he was sent to photograph Louis Armstrong at a nearby nightclub.

At one point in later life he lived in Watkins Glen, N.Y., and played with a group that included the local ambulance driver and the county coroner. “A bad wreck on a Saturday night would decimate the band,” Conklin says. “The guys would go flying off and there we’d be, cornet and drums.”

In the mid-’70s Conklin, by now working in Los Angeles, began to be aware that the great American jazz musicians were much better received in Europe than in their own country, and their music better known.

“I wanted to see a situation here where we could do our part to keep the roots of jazz alive and honor those guys who were the origins of rock ‘n’ roll and everything else that came after.”

Conklin and some pals founded the Jazz Forum to celebrate traditional jazz and to encourage young jazz musicians through scholarships and a chance to sit in on the Forum’s monthly jam sessions on Sunday afternoons.

The annual Memorial Day weekend of traditional jazz in Sacramento, now a dozen years old and drawing crowds in the tens of thousands, is the model Conklin hopes the local bash can emulate. He understands it’s now the third most populous festival in the state.

Traditional jazz has a surprising number of young enthusiasts on and off the platform. There are some uncommonly skilled and imaginative new-generation players in many of the bands, and there are plenty of unsilvered heads in the crowd.

Conklin estimates there are about 100 jazz clubs in the country, with a combined mailing list of perhaps 15,000 names, all eager, he prays, to hear about the Labor Day pleasures, which begin at the Marriott at 4:30 p.m. Aug. 30, a Friday.

The local numbers for information are (213) 867-7501, (818) 340-1516 and (714) 538-2880.