# Jazz Summer Fest 2022 lures sax great Bobby Watson back to Bay Area: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2022/09/01/jazz-summer-fest-2022-lures-sax-great-bobby-watson-back-to-bay-area-video-photos/
- Published: 2022-09-01T00:02:49+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Bobby Watson isn’t trying to start a brawl with his fellow horn players. He’s 
just wants to make it clear that when it comes to his approach to the alto saxophone
he’s a lover, not a fighter.**

“The tenor sax is more of a punch horn,” Watson said. “It lends itself towards a
tough tone, like Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. With the alto, I try to lean toward
melody. Of course there’s technique, but I don’t use that as my main modus operandi.
I try to sing my song.”

After several decades as a scarce presence on the West Coast, Watson is crooning
with an all-star quartet Aug. 13 at San Jose Jazz’s Summer Fest, performing an afternoon
set at the Montgomery Theater and an evening show on the Hammer 4 Stage. An incandescent
improviser and oft-covered composer responsible for a bevy of strikingly beautiful,
recognizable tunes, Watson is reintroducing himself to Bay Area audiences.

Last month he played a gripping weekend run at The 222, a nonprofit performance 
space in Healdsburg, his first California gig since he retired after 20 years as
an endowed professor of jazz studies at University of Missouri-Kansas City. At Summer
Fest, which runs Aug. 12-14 at indoor and outdoor stages around the Plaza de Cesar
Chavez, Watson is the jazz centerpiece for an expansive roster of artists representing
the best of blues, R&B, salsa, an array of Latin American styles, and of course 
jazz of many stripes.

Aside from his lush tone, what sets Watson apart from so many of his peers is his
extravagant sense of lyricism, a sensibility he’s honed by absorbing the alto sax’s
legacy from Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges to Charlie Parker and Cannonball Adderley.
His tunes are a direct expression of his fecund imagination and abiding love of 
melody.

“I don’t set out to write any song at a certain tempo,” he said. “I don’t think 
about the form. I just let it take me where it goes. I don’t use odd rhythms unless
it feels natural. On ‘Mabel Is Able’ there are some time shifts, but it feels natural.
The main thing is melody.”

![Bobby Watson Pins Down The Blues](https://i0.wp.com/downbeat.com/images/news/_full/
BobbyWatson_katzWEB.jpg?resize=640%2C480&ssl=1)

For the San Jose shows he’s joined by a superlative band with veteran bassist Curtis
Lundy, who’s worked with Watson as a co-leader and sideman for more than 30 years;
pianist Cyrus Chestnut, a prolific leader in his own right; and drummer Victor Jones,
a widely traveled accompanist who’s toured and recorded with the likes of Stan Getz,
James Moody, Stanley Clarke, Phyllis Hyman, Dizzy Gillespie, and Chaka Khan.

It’s the same rhythm section that Watson recorded with on his upcoming album for
Smoke Sessions Records, “Back Home in Kansas City,” a band that’s “like a magic 
carpet,” he said. “You get on and they just fly. This is actually the first time
I got a chance to record with Cyrus and be around, though I’ve been knowing him 
for years. He and Curtis go back to Betty Carter,” the late, pervasively influential
vocalist whose band served as one of jazz’s most important finishing schools for
young players.

Watson first gained recognition as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the
only band that surpassed Carter’s as a launching pad for little-known players. Within
months of arriving in New York City in 1976 a friend introduced him to the drummer“
and he took a liking to me,” Watson recalled. “We were traveling right away, and
we recorded our first record, ‘Gypsy Folk Tales.’ I wasn’t ready, but that’s the
way it goes. It was trial by fire. It’s like, blow man! If you can’t, somebody else
will.”

Even the greatest talent scout of the modern jazz era, not to mention one of the
most powerful and swinging drummers ever, wasn’t immune from stylistic changes. 
With the advent of jazz/rock fusion in the late 1960s Blakey’s acoustic hard bop
sound lost currency. The Jazz Messengers continued to be a formidable band, but 
he increasingly relied on veteran players who’d previously passed through the ranks
rather than hungry young musicians looking to make a name for themselves. Watson
was 22-years-old when joined the Messengers and exactly what the band had been lacking.

“We really brought Art back, I think with the writing and then he had a consistent
band that stuck with him,” Watson said. “‘Cause when I joined the band people weren’t
writing. They were playing all the old stuff. He was a survivor and if the band 
didn’t have the spirit, he didn’t force it. But he was always looking for somebody
out of the corner of his eye, and it was great to see how the band just steadily
rose and got better and better.”

Picking up the Messengers’ mantle, Watson has boosted some of jazz’s most illustrious
players, leaving his mark with the searing beauty of his music.

![Alto saxophonist Bobby Watson makes a rare return to the Bay Area to perform two
shows Aug. 13 at San Jose Jazz Summer Fest.](https://i0.wp.com/www.mercurynews.com/
wp-content/uploads/2022/08/SJM-L-WATSON-0811-01.jpg?resize=640%2C454&ssl=1)

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