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Let the jazz begin

By Loren Keller and John Kenyon

Three A-list headliners set to play the Iowa City Jazz Festival and Fourth of July fireworks relocated to the University of Iowa campus are expected to draw audiences of up to 40,000 people to downtown Iowa City this weekend.

Mary Frieden, executive director of Summer of the Arts, has fielded calls about the three-day festival from as far away as Louisiana.

"I've gotten calls from Wisconsin, Chicago, Minnesota, Kansas City... People who are traveling up here for this festival are so excited to see these bands playing," she says.

Medeski, Martin and Wood are headlining the free festival at 8 p.m. Friday. Following their set, the Iowa City-Coralville Jaycees will launch its Fourth of July fireworks display from the UI's Hubbard Park around 10 or 10:15 p.m. Spectators can watch from the Pentacrest.

The festival kicks off at 4 p.m. Friday with a long list of local bands. On Saturday, Garaj Mahal and Bonerama will warm up the crowd for the guitar laden sound of the John Scofield Trio. The music continues Sunday with Jenny Scheinman and the Joshua Redman Trio. All headliners are scheduled to play at 8 p.m.

More than 15 other local and regional jazz groups will also perform on the side stage, college stage and youth stage throughout the three-day festival. The weather forecast calls for mostly sunny skies.

Summer of the Arts, the umbrella organization that producers the festival, will be collecting in part for flood relief.

"We will have an increase in asks for donations during the festival as we're trying to reach our festival goals for income," Frieden says. "We will be donating 10 percent of all of the pass-the-hat donations that we receive at the festival to the Johnson County Flood Relief Fund."

KCCK-FM radio will broadcast nearly 20 hours of main stage performances Friday through Sunday. Check CorridorBUZZ.com throughout the weekend for reviews and sound clips.

Here is a look at the festival's three headliners. The full schedule of music is posted here.

Medeski, Martin & Wood

At its heart, Medeski, Martin & Wood is a classic organ trio. The three musicians, however, are not content to simply play the music that such a lineup might suggest. While the rhythms are tight and John Medeski's organ is undeniably funky, from the beginning the group has experimented with hip hop beats, samples, found sounds and other electronic enhancements. The result is a sort of urban future-jazz. The band, like fellow headliner John Scofield, has crossed over to the jam band arena, its mix of long, improvisatory jams and soulful grooves a perfect fit for that laid-back scene. In fact, the trio has collaborated on several occasions with Scofield, including his 1997 album, A Go Go, and 2006's quartet disc, Out Louder.

Furthering its adventuresome bent, the band announced earlier this year that it planned three tours and three new albums following a write-tour-record-repeat format. They began this process in February, and plan to embark on the second tour shortly after their appearance at the Iowa City Jazz Festival. According to the band, "Each body of new material will be unique to each tour (if you see it in New York, you won't see it in Los Angeles). Some of the material may make it into the band's festival sets, but the bulk of it will only be performed during the specified tour period."

John Scofield

John Scofield is the rare jazz musician whose audience is growing – and growing younger – as he progresses through his career. The guitarist first picked up his instrument at age 11, attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston to further hone his chops and then began playing with a succession of musicians that included George Duke, Gerry Mulligan and Gary Burton. It was his stint backing Miles Davis, however, which made him a household name in jazz circles. He spent three years with Davis in the early 1980s, alternating between that work and his own as leader.

Over the past decade, he has moved progressively toward a more wide-open funk sound, opening the door to jam-band fans who appreciate his groove-based improvisations. At the same time, his playing remains rooted in hard bop jazz. He has said in the past that he hopes to marry the two, bringing the best elements of each to his performance. "There's a lot of joy involved, a lot of overt happiness," he said of jam music. "I hope to bring that to jazz." At the moment, he is playing with the ScoHorns, a four-piece horn section that complements his regular trio with Larry Grenadier and Billy Stewart. It's the latest in a long line of changes for the guitarist, and another he'll no doubt take in stride. "Each change just sets it up for me to go back to the other groove," he said a couple of years ago. "Every time you play with different people, the songs will take on a little different quality."

Joshua Redman

The most traditional of the headliners, Redman is nonetheless a unique jazz talent. The son of saxophonist Dewey Redman, he picked up his father's instrument early, and, after winning the 1991 Thelonious Monk competition at age 22, inked a contract with Warner Bros. Records. In the intervening 17 years, he has issued 13 discs as a leader and performed on several others, literally growing up in public. Detractors say he doesn't have an identifiable sound – a reasonable critique – but his muscular yet supple tone puts him comfortably in the company of journeymen like Gene Ammons and Joe Henderson. As such, he is known more for his performance than his songwriting.

His producers and record labels have had the tendency to surround him with star players, but on his most recent work, he has hewed to more traditional small group lineups. Yaya3 found him performing with organist Sam Yahel and frequent drummer Brian Blade, while his latest disc, Back East, features three trios, all featuring Redman, a bassist and a drummer. Of the music, he says it's a "return to a style I associate with the east coast, a return to playing – for lack of a better description – modern, swing-based, acoustic jazz. This was and is my musical bread and butter, the core of what I do."