San Jose Jazz Summer Fest hits all the right notes

It’s difficult to tally all the highlights from San Jose Jazz Summer Fest, but it was a solid musical celebration from the first acts on Friday afternoon through the last notes Sunday night.

Like other recent years, the festival’s 29th annual edition drew about half its audience from outside Santa Clara County, and those visitors seemed to be having a great time in San Jose.

“We got out of the gate in a much more robust way this year,” San Jose Jazz Executive Director Brendan Rawson said Saturday during the VIP-packed Mayor’s Jazz Brunch at Scott’s Seafood. “There was a lot more programming than we usually have on a Friday night.”

The big names — Johnny Gill, Goapele, ConFunkShun, Kool & the Gang, and Herb Alpert & Lani Hall — drew the crowds you’d expect at the main stage at Plaza de Cesar Chavez. But the Blues/Big Easy Stage was rollicking too, with acts like the Soul Rebels and Andre Thierry. And it was often standing-room only at festival favorite Cafe Stritch and El Taurino, a relatively new Mexican restaurant and music lounge on South Market Street.

The biggest surprise was the serendipitous success of the patio stage at Sushi Confidential, which was packed with people all weekend long. The stage was added only to replace the Gordon Biersch brewpub, a popular longtime festival venue that closed in June. Gordon Biersch was a great stage, but Sushi Confidential took the festival to a new place — and that place was San Pedro Square.

As a free stage easily seen and heard by pedestrians, it was able to draw on the crowds of downtown dwellers who didn’t have festival passes. And it connected the festival to the area’s already hot nightlife scene like it never has been. While Tabard Theatre has hosted the Swing Stage for years, as an indoor

stage tucked away in the second-floor playhouse, it lacked visibility. (And even the crowds at Tabard seemed up this year).

There were only two

real drawbacks: Saturday’s sweltering heat, which resulted in a few people requiring medical attention, and the Adobe Silicon Valley Stage inside the Fairmont Hotel’s Club Regent.

There was nothing wrong with the acts booked for the stage, but the brightly-lit room was

set up more for a PowerPoint presentation than a bebop show — and the atmosphere suffered in comparison to the hopping Lobby Lounge right outside the door. Bringing down the lights a little and adding a bar next year would turn that room into a very smooth jazz club.

But the highlight for those who got in was hearing San Jose native Jackie Gage debut “A Secret Place,” a heartfelt ballad about her hometown, at a jam-packed Cafe Stritch on Saturday night. “She’ll ask me where do you wanna go, L.A. or San Francisco,” Gage sang

soulfully. “I tell her I won’t be too far away, I’m going back to San Jose.”

Gage lives and performs in New York City now and told the crowd, which included her father, Henry, as well as her brother and grandmother, “I can’t believe I’m singing this song about San Jose here in

front of all my friends and family from San Jose.”

It was an unbelievable experience for the audience, too, and we already can’t wait to hear it more often.