The Scranton Jazz Festival that will play out Friday through Sunday in Northeast Pennsylvania’s largest city shows signs of maturity.
First, this is the 21st edition of a festival inaugurated in 2005. (COVID-19 silenced it in 2020.)
“Yeah, we are legal now to drink,” festival co-founder and artistic director Marko Marcinko quipped.
He’s definitely joking because the festival venues in downtown Scranton are almost all licensed to serve alcohol.
More importantly, the 21st festival will feature bassist Ron Carter, the kind of jazz legend SJF has rarely hosted in its 20 previous editions.
In a storied career, Carter, 89, a Michigan native, has played with some of the greatest names in music’s history — Thelonious Monk, Cannonball Adderley, Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner, Andrew Hill, Horace Silver. Perhaps most famously, Carter spent five years in the legendary 1960s Miles Davis Quintet that included pianist Herbie Hancock, tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter and drummer Tony Williams.
In 2012, Downbeat Magazine, a bible for jazz lovers, elected Carter to its Hall of Fame.
“Well, this is quite a wonderful thing that Ron Carter is going to join us,” Marcinko said. “He's a so significant in America, in American music history, world music history.”
How he got Carter
Marcinko, who knows many jazz performers, said he didn’t know Carter when he thought to bring him to the festival.
“Yeah, I took a shot, and through mutual people that I know in the music business over my many years of touring and recording and playing festivals, I was able to get in touch with them,” he said.
Davis, perhaps second only to Louis Armstrong among trumpet players in jazz history, would have turned 100 years old earlier this year, a fact Marcinko noted.
“It's 100 years of Miles Davis ... and Ron Carter being in one of the most significant, if not the most significant, bands that Miles Davis ever had — his quintet with Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter and Miles — (it) was just very important for me to reach out and see if he would be available to do this,” Marcinko said. “And he happened to be available to do it.”
Carter’s appearance will close the downtown Scranton portion of the festival. He will play with the Scranton Jazz Festival Big Band on Sunday at 6:45 p.m. at the Scranton Cultural Center at Masonic Temple.
“He's going to be our special guest with the big band, ... playing the charts (music) that are from his book, his Ron Carter greatest big band book,” Marcinko said. “So, it's going to be an amazing night.”
Plus a Grammy winner
The festival’s other headliner, the Grammy Award-winning, New Orleans-based Dirty Dozen Brass Band, will play Saturday at 7 p.m. at Theater at North, 1539 N. Main Ave., Scranton.
Founded in 1977, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band has released more than 20 albums, blending bebop jazz, funk, rhythm and blues and soul.
“This unique sound, described by the band as a ‘musical gumbo,’ has allowed the Dirty Dozen to tour across five continents and more than 30 countries, record 12 studio albums and collaborate with a range of artists from Modest Mouse to Widespread Panic to Norah Jones,” the band’s website says. “The Dirty Dozen Brass Band is a world-famous music machine whose name is synonymous with genre-bending romps and high-octane performances.”
The festival is also trying a new wrinkle.
"I will also mention this because each year we try to do something inventive. We try to do something new. We try to bring something fresh into the into our circle of jazz festival weekend, and this year we made a partnership, a beautiful partnership, with the Iron Horse Society and with the Steamtown National Historic Site," Marcinko said. " And first time ever for the families, for the kids, we are doing jazz train rides on Saturday, where there's a trio, there's going to be a trio performing on the train car as the train does its excursion from Steamtown all the way up to Nay Aug Park and back."
The train ride and the performances by Carter and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band require tickets, which can be bought by clicking the links in this sentence.
Beyond the headliners, the festival will feature its usual lineup of local and regional jazz, blues, funk and soul artists performing at 25 venues in or near downtown Scranton.
The full schedule of jazz festival venues and artists can be found here.
