250Lex presents historic Equinox Jazz Festival: ‘Perfect music for the times’

A few years ago, local organizers of the Origins Jazz Series were approached by VisitLEX with a novel idea — to present a jazz festival that drew on national, as well as regional, talents in hopes of drawing audiences from both in and outside of Lexington.

“At the time, we looked at what it would really take to produce something like that and thought that we needed more time to build up to it,” said Origins co-founder Eli Uttal-Veroff.

Chester Grundy, another Origins chieftain with a devotion to the music that stems back to the beginnings of the University of Kentucky’s Spotlight Jazz Series in 1978, put it more succinctly.

“We weren’t ready,” he said. “We had to admit that. We weren’t ready, so we kind of begged off. I’m so glad that we did because now I think we are. We’re ready as an organization.”

How ready? Ready enough that when officials for 250Lex again proposed a jazz festival as part of its year-long celebrations, Origins felt the time could not have been better. With that comes this week’s Equinox Jazz Festival, a five-day run of wide-ranging jazz performances taking place primarily at the Kentucky Theatre.

The scope of the festival will encompass local and regional performers, acclaimed national artists including Grammy-winning saxophonist Kenny Garrett, university ensembles and more. But the stylistic range of Equinox will be just as broad, running from hard bop to big band to vocal jazz to free jazz improvisation. Squeezing such a hefty musical agenda into a concentrated performance period was, for the Origins team, one of the key goals for Equinox. It was also its greatest challenge.

“We really wanted to do something that would be representative of a broad spectrum of stylistic expressions of jazz — genre, gender, every category we could bridge,” Grundy said. “And that was a long process.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I’ve never put together a festival. A series is a different matter. But a festival, when you’re challenged to do this stuff in a set period, gets to be really sticky. You’re at the whim of a lot of forces and variables that are just out of your control. Agents are slow to get back to you. There’s negotiation. There’s the matching of schedules. That was probably the toughest part of this — trying to come up with something that matched our vision. It took more time than we anticipated. “It was an explicit goal of ours going in that we didn’t want Equinox to be a jazz festival that skewed hard in any one direction,” Uttal-Veroff said. “We felt it was for the jazz lover who wanted to check out many different genres and styles all together.”

A Sunday outing with singer Kandace Springs, who first performed an Origins show at the Singletary Center for the Arts in 2023, will likely appeal to jazz fans with an appreciation for the accessibility and, to a degree, familiarity of vocal jazz with blues accents. But Equinox will also swing dramatically in the other direction.

Sitting in the middle of day-long Saturday events that begin with a free Farmer’s Market outing by the Louisville-based Brazilian ensemble Brazukas and conclude with evening Kentucky Theatre concerts by Garrett and drummer Nate Smith, will be a percussion duo performance by Tim Daisy and Chris Corsano. Both Chicago-based artists know Lexington well, having played here many times separately for the long-running Outside the Spotlight (OTS) series of free jazz and improvisational music performances. Daisy, in fact, played the inaugural OTS concert, a 2002 performance by the Free Music Ensemble, at the then-named Downtown Arts Center.

“Lexington is one of my favorite places to play anywhere,” Daisy said. “Honestly. People ask me how I go about setting up a tour. Well, first I contact Lexington, Kentucky, then I contact Columbia, South Carolina. Then we just try to fill in the gaps.

“It’s wonderful to be Chicago, to be around people who are your musical peers, who kick you in the ass a little bit. But it always feels a little more satisfying to present my music in places away from larger metropolitan areas. It’s like what I do matters more. Say I’m in New York. There are a hundred things going on any evening. You’ll be lucky if four people walk through the door because there all these other things happening. Chicago and New York are both tremendous cities, but it feels special to me when I play in Lexington and some of these other places.”

For Keith McCutchen, associate professor of music at Kentucky State University, but also a pianist and composer with Central Kentucky roots that extend back well over four decades, Equinox afforded a prime opportunity. It allowed him to organize the Kentucky State Generations Ensemble for the occasion — a group of KSU students, alumni and faculty in a program of gospel, blues and classical works. McCutchen said all are different jazz components that are products of the spiritual.

“I’m pulling together all the entities that for me, as a composer, create a jazz sensation from a HBCU (historically black college and university) perspective. From that perspective, jazz doesn’t exist without the spiritual, that entity that leads to the blues, to jazz, to rock ‘n’ roll.

“It’s a labor of love pulling together the different inter-generational group beings we’ve got here.”

To present such a broad spectrum of jazz accents in a single festival is a challenge for any city. But for Lexington, a city with a far greater mainstream appreciation for rock, country and bluegrass, the realization of Equinox is a true achievement.

“To have this in place with this kind of prominence, in a festival on the scale of 250Lex, is so affirming for me,” Grundy said. “It allows people to share a vision of the significance of this music, historically and culturally, that is appropriate and necessary.”

“On one hand, it’s terrifying because the festival is now here,” Uttal-Veroff said. “But on the other band, it’s exhilarating. There is definitely an adrenalin rush in getting all the details that have been in motion for a long time and just finalizing everything and getting the whole event mechanized — you know, turn the key and have it roar to life. It’s a chance for us to present artists on a level we’ve never moved onto before.”

“Excited?” Grundy questioned back when asked about how anticipatory his mood was with Equinox just a few days away. “I’m ecstatic. If the response matches the vision, this could be really historic.

“I do believe that if this stands up to our expectations, it will make a case for the popularity and acceptance of this music, which is really important to me. And it’s just the perfect music for the times we’re living through. It’s absolutely perfect.”

Equinox Jazz Fest

When: Sept. 17-21. Performance times vary.

Where: Kentucky Theatre, 214 E. Main, and other venues

Tickets: $125 for the entire festival. Tickets can also be purchased for each concert individually (see below). Several performances have a flexible “pay what you want” admission.

Online: originsjazz.org/equinox-jazz-festival Here is the full lineup of performances, venues and specific ticket prices for the Equinox Jazz Fest.

Brandon Meeks

Sept. 17 at 7 p.m., The Melroy, 144 N. Broadway. Sold out

Equinox’s opening night outing with Indianapolis-rooted bassist Meeks and a quintet that pulls from a library of traditional and contemporary influences is sold out

Rose Colella with the Osland-Dailey Jazztet

Sept. 18 at 7 p.m., Kentucky Theatre, 214 E. Main. Pay what you want.

Los Angeles-based vocalist Rose Colella joins the long-running Lexington jazz troupe led by saxophonist/flutist Miles Osland and pianist Raleigh Dailey.

Origins All Star Big Band with Camille Thurman: A Tribute to the Narcotic Farm

Sept. 19 at 7 p.m., Kentucky Theatre. Pay what you want.

Origins’ top local and regional favorites team with New York singer/saxophonist Thurman to honor the ’50s/’60s era jazz greats treated for addiction at Lexington’s then-named “Narc Farm” (now the Federal Medical Center).

Late Night Jam Session

Sept,. 19 at 10 p.m., The Manchester, 941 Manchester St. Free

The hotel lobby of The Manchester opens up for a free jam session following the Origins All Stars/Camille Thurman concert. All vocalists and musicians are welcome to join in.

Brazukas

Sept. 20 at 10 a.m., Farmer’s Market, 251 Main. Free.

Brazukas peppers the downtown Farmer’s Market with music made in Kentucky but inspired by the traditional and contemporary sounds of Brazil.

Tim Daisy and Chris Corsano

Sept. 20 at 3:30 p.m., Kentucky Theatre/State Theatre. Pay what you want.

Origins invites the long-running Outside the Spotlight series to Equinox by presenting a unique set of duo percussion improvisations featuring two veterans of numerous OTS concerts.

Kenny Garrett

Sept. 20 at 6 p.m., Kentucky Theatre. $36.80

A Grammy winning saxophonist and NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) Jazz Master, Garrett’s dossier includes, along with his own expert albums, work with such jazz titans as Miles Davis, Chick Corea and Art Blakey.

Nate Smith

Sept. 20 at8:30 p.m., Kentucky Theatre. $36.80

Smith is a Grammy-nominated drummer and documentary score composer with a far-reaching list of recording credits that runs from Brittany Howard to Paul Simon to Dave Holland.

Keith McCutchen and the Kentucky State Generations Jazz Ensemble

Sept. 21 at 3:30 p.m., Kentucky Theatre. Pay what you want.

Longtime Central Kentucky jazz pianist McCutchen, currently associate professor of Mmusic at Kentucky State University, leads an ensemble of KSU students, alumni and faculty in a program of gospel, blues and classical works.

Kandace Springs

Sept. 21 at 6 p.m., Kentucky Theatre. $31.50.

Nashville-born vocalist and pianist Springs wowed Lexington at an Origins concert in 2023 with her blend of jazz and soul. Her newest recording is a song-for-song interpretation of Billie Holiday’s greatest album, 1958’s “Lady in Satin.”