What a difference a decade makes.

The Montavilla Jazz Festival–a volunteer effort that began as a one-day neighborhood event in 2014 with a $6,000 budget–has grown to three days, with 30 concerts in 12 venues. Scheduled for August 30 – September 1, the 11th annual festival’s budget is more than 30% larger than last year, and it’s finally able to pay Executive Director Neil Mattson a salary. The Festival has spilled well beyond the neighborhood where it was founded, yet remains rooted in Montavilla. This expansion is designed to increase its impact on the neighborhood and more fully showcase all of Portland’s growing jazz community.

“When we started,” says co-founder Ryan Meagher (pronounced Marr), “we felt it was filling a need. The Portland Jazz Festival is an incredible festival, but it wasn’t focusing on local artists, especially with regard to original music.” 

And though Montavilla has become one of the city’s premiere jazz festivals, its origin story sounds like the set-up for an old joke:

Two guitarists, a graphic designer and a community activist walk into a bar …

And in truth that was how it began, as founders Fritz Hirsch, Aaron Hayman, Mattson and Meagher recall. They wanted to raise the neighborhood’s visibility and build an audience for jazz by staging an event that would become “the city’s most adventurous jazz festival,” attracting sophisticated fans while also serving Montavilla residents.

A tall order.

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But with the help of many volunteers, the founders have attracted audiences for “adventurous jazz,” and their vision has come to represent one of the city’s most promising approaches to helping jazz thrive.

It all starts with the neighborhood.

MONTAVILLA

Since the 1960s, artists and advocates have wondered how to make jazz part of a living culture as it was in the mid-20th century. The Montavilla team’s answer was to forge connections with the neighborhood association, local businesses, and schools that would anchor it in the area. (Read ArtsWatch’s MJF origin story.)

In the first year, they began giving direct grants to school music programs and later funded Artist in Residence series at Vestal Elementary and Bridger Schools. And they found sponsors — as well as sites for some performances — among the area’s businesses.

But their programs in the schools are the best example of “leveraging neighborhood support,” according to Mattson, “In last two years, we’ve connected programming at Vestal to the Festival [by having Resident artists perform every year], with the ultimate goal of getting the Vestal families to come to the Festival.” Artists in Residence at the neighborhood schools have included Machado Mijiga, Raul Gomez, Marcia Hocker, Israel Annoh, Mary-Sue Tobin, and in 2024, Julana and Carmelo Torres. (Read ArtsWatch’s story about MJF educational efforts.)

The goal of using the Festival to boost the visibility and reputation of the neighborhood was enhanced by two programs devoted to the Festival and its artists on Christian McBride’s nationally syndicated show, “Jazz Night in America,” in 2019 and 2020. 

“They did a whole episode on Mel Brown, who was headlining the festival that year,” says Mattson, “and they picked up on our ‘Pandemic Take Out Jazz’ series and focused on [that year’s headliner] Charlie Porter’s program.”

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A new Alberta on Stark Street? The commercial development in the area has been good for the Festival, and it built on The Lonely Planet’s 2017 listing of the neighborhood as one of the “Top 10 U.S. neighborhoods to visit now.”

What really helped the Festival to expand, however, was a Scale-Up Grant from Prosper Portland in May of this year. And the grant offered technical support as well. “That got us in the room with Tri-Met,” says Mattson, “got us with Travel Portland to talk about our marketing strategy and give us feedback on the event.”

To increase the impact on the neighborhood, the Festival has expanded this year to include four free concerts and DJ sets in Montavilla Plaza, which makes the music more accessible to local residents. In addition to the concerts and jam sessions that have always been held in the neighborhood, a number of headline events will be live-streamed as well. And the neighborhood movie theater will screen a couple of film noirs with jazz soundtracks on Friday and Saturday nights.

And they plan to do more. “The community is why we’re here, so we need to look deeply at the community and say, ‘What are the needs? How can we meet them? We need to see what more we can do,” says Mattson.

But Mattson and Meagher, jazz players themselves who assumed most management and programming duties after 2017, were focused on the music first. 

ARTISTS FIRST

Besides serving the neighborhood, the Festival’s mission has always been to “treat artists with dignity and respect and pay a more than fair wage for performance services.” More than the pay, however, Meagher and Mattson wanted to support emerging artists as well as foster growth for their more established elders.

“We’ve always wanted our artists to go for it,” says Meagher, “to not feel they have to play by certain rules, to do their own thing the way they feel most comfortable.” And this year’s Festival presents plenty of what Meagher calls “music that’s unapologetic.”

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As a result, artists view a slot at the Festival as an opportunity to develop projects they may not be able to perform in nightclubs or other venues because of size or cost. Pianist and composer Jasnam Daya Singh, for instance, has composed work for jazz trio and string quartet (5:00 pm, Saturday, August 31, Portland Metro Arts Bldg.). The Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, a regular partner of the Festival, will present new compositions by drummer Christopher Brown in a program titled “Unearthing the Extraordinary,” with the ambitious goal of illuminating acts of leadership that have helped shape the city.

That concert  — with free admission and an opening set by Julana Torres’ La Colorá featuring her brother Carmelo Torres — will open the Festival on Friday, August 30 at 6:00 pm, at the Mt. Tabor Caldera Amphitheater. Their first concert in the park last year drew an estimated 1,100 people.

Another new direction this year is the scheduling of overlapping events. So while the crowd ascends Mt. Tabor, pianist and composer Randy Porter will be playing the first of two sets at the 1905, a student combo will hit at Montavilla Brew Works, and, an hour later, The Sound Creation Trio will present free-form music by drummer and composer Matt Mayhall at Strum. Later, you can choose between “Late Night with Noah Simpson” (who one local observer called “the best up-and-coming trumpet player in the nation”) at the 1905 at 10:00 pm, and the beautifully crafted and wide-ranging compositions of the Chris Lee Sextet at Dingo’s at 10:30 pm.

Whew!

And that’s just Friday night. The Festival’s top headliner doesn’t play until Sunday at the Alberta Rose Theater. That would be the adventurous Portland native, saxophonist and composer Nicole Glover, who’s now working with the all-star, all-woman group Artemis, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and Christian McBride’s ensemble. She’ll perform with her trio of horn, drums and bass at 8:00 pm.

Glover is one of six women instrumentalists to lead bands at the Festival — also an increase from previous years. The bright, snappy tunes of drummer Rivkah Ross (noon, Sunday Sept. 1) will provide the sounds for just one of the four admission-free concerts at Montavilla Plaza. The original music of trombonist Adriana Wagner offers another (4:00 pm Saturday).

So even though one of the festival’s goals is to provide opportunities for established artists like Porter, Singh, Dan Balmer and Kerry Politzer, eight of the bandleaders headlining this year are under 35 years of age.

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See the Montavilla Jazz Festival website for the full schedule and other details.

NEW DIRECTIONS

But the number of emerging artists at the Festival has been increasing every year, so perhaps a more important change is the new process for selecting performers. Previously, Mattson and Meagher had done that, with Meagher taking the lead. This year, in an effort to make the process more transparent, organizers solicited applications from the jazz community. 

“And the response was tremendous,” says Board Vice-President Marcia Hocker. “We received 50 applications.” Designed to prioritize diversity, they were judged by a panel of six anonymous musicians drawn from the 12 headliners at the 2023 Festival. That panel chose 18 acts from those applications, while Mattson selected the remaining four.

“I’m proud of the panel,” he says. “It’s a key part of giving the jazz community something they can believe in [and] a platform where they have an opportunity to say something unique.” But the new frontier for the Festival going forward is greater community involvement.

“I don’t think it needs to be any bigger,” he says. “We’re trying to have an impact on the community. If there’s a jazz festival in the neighborhood, let’s make it something that businesses and community members look forward to and take some ownership of,” says Mattson, a small business owner in the neighborhood himself. “Yes, we want sophisticated audiences for musicians who are pushing boundaries, but we want to broaden that a bit in future — because there are a lot of entry points into jazz.”

And organizers are hoping to “get back to a strong volunteer program” that will offer more opportunities for people to become involved in the Festival. To that end they have contracted with an Outreach Coordinator to facilitate volunteer efforts. In 2023, 40 volunteers took part. They hope to double that number this year.

Increasing that kind of involvement is crucial to the Festival’s future as a model for making jazz part of a living culture — an endeavor rooted in building community.

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“Volunteer opportunities and engagement are a big secondary avenue for the Festival to grow and be relevant,” says Mattson. “That’s part of community building. And adding opportunities and funding for local artists, hopefully that’s building community, too, like channeling the impact to local businesses, whether its economic or uplifting community pride … You have to build a structure for that to actually happen,” he concludes.

And that’s the Festival’s primary task in its second decade: find the funding, build the partnerships, and involve more of the community. This year’s event looks like an auspicious beginning.

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Lynn Darroch has been awarded the 2024 Nick Fish Community Service Award by the Festival.