Red-hot jazz musicians jamming away on a flat-bed truck rolling through downtown Hartford Friday from 4 to 7 p.m. herald the opening of the 19th annual Greater Hartford Festival of Jazz (GHFJ), a free, outdoor event that's expected to draw more than 50,000 people this weekend to the city's scenic Bushnell Park.
The mobile, urban jazz unit—a swinging swat team concept borrowed from the streets of New Orleans—is just one new idea that the non-profit GHFJ has added to its highly popular blend of multiple jazz styles, including crowd-pleasing smooth and contemporary jazz and jazzy pop and fizzy fusions of all kinds, along with Latin jazz, big band and even straight ahead jazz.
While serving three days of eclectic sounds ranging from saucy and soulful to sweet and smooth, the festival, which is held rain or shine, transforms the downtown park into a mammoth backyard party for the City of Hartford. The festive ambience comes complete with an aromatic food court serving sizzling cuisine and a bustling, bazaar-like arts-and-crafts and merchant marketplace.
Even if you don't like jazz or outright hate it, you still might get swept up in the park's fairgrounds atmosphere, its intoxicating mix of leisure and pleasure and infectious communal spirit that somehow seem to connect 20,000 strangers in an inexplicable but quite pleasant way.
And then there's the sheer, spectacular beauty to savor when the sun sets creating a breathtaking perspective on the city's skyline and, most of all, on the gold-domed State Capitol building in all its magical, Gothic glory looking down from its hilltop on the picturesque park below.
The heart of the matter is, of course, the festival's huge potpourri of pop and jazz, which opens Friday at 7 p.m. with pianist/vocalist/songwriter Christine Spero and her group uncorking its bubbly brand of nu-jazz/pop/Latin and Brazilian soul rhythms.
Spero and other headliners play on the Main Stage, which is complemented by the Friends of the Festival Stage, which features such top Connecticut-based acts as the venerable Hartford Jazz Orchestra with vocalist Bobbi Rogers.
On Saturday and Sunday, festival fare ranges from percussionist Doc Gibbs, who's best known as the band leader on the Food Network's "Emeril Live!", to TIZER, featuring keyboardist Lao Tizer, guitarist Chieli Minucci of Special EFX fame and violinist Karen Briggs.
http://www.courant.com/entertainment/music/hc-jazz-festival-bushnell-park-20100716,0,6753685.story
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