by Daniel Huberman
Daily Lobo
A new festival will be jazzing up New Mexico for the next two weeks.
There will be performances in Albuquerque as well as Santa Fe, said Tom Guralnick, founder of the New Mexico Jazz Festival and executive director of Outpost Productions.
"We are featuring quite a few local artists and performers as well as really top-of-the-line, world-renowned jazz acts," Guralnick said.
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This will be the first New Mexico Jazz Festival.
"This jazz festival is sort of stemming from a festival that was around for five years that Bruce Dunlap and the Open Arts Foundation put on," Guralnick said. "In a period of three weeks, they did a tremendous amount of music. When Bruce decided to not do the festival, the Lensic, the Outpost and the Santa Fe Jazz Foundation got together and said, 'Well, let's keep the momentum of this festival that Bruce has been producing and keep something going."
The result was the New Mexico Jazz Festival.
"The artists that we're bringing are fairly major," Guralnick said. "Branford Marsalis is Wynton Marsalis' brother, and he's one of the best known jazz artists in the world. McCoy Tyner is also playing on the last Saturday of this two-week period. He was the pianist with the Coltrane Quartet. He's really a very important figure in jazz."
The Outpost has a history of presenting jazz as well as other music and art since 1988, Guralnick said.
"We're one of the major, if not the major jazz presenters in the state," he said. "Most of what we do is here at the Outpost Performance Space, but we also do larger concerts like Wynton Marsalis and all kinds of other things - concerts at Popejoy Hall, the KiMo and the Lensic in Santa Fe."
The festival will have performances at the Outpost, located on Yale Boulevard, the Albuquerque Museum, the Lensic and Albuquerque's Old Town Plaza.
The Outpost is partnering with several organizations for this festival, something that does not happen often, Guralnick said.
"It's pretty rare for organizations to collaborate like this, usually were all busy fighting with each other," he said.
Organizations are not the only things coming together for the festival, he said.
"The goal is to bring these two cities together a little bit more. I don't know if it's going to work, but that's the goal," Guralnick said.
The festival begins July 20 with New Mexico's own Doug Lawrence.
"Doug is really a fantastic saxophonist," Guralnick said. "He grew up here in Albuquerque, and he plays with the Count Basie Orchestra 200 nights a year touring around the world. He recently moved back, and he's a terrific guy. It's going to be a great gig."
Lawrence said it is always great to be back in Albuquerque.
"I'm always working so hard touring," Lawrence said. "I come to Albuquerque and chill out."
Thursday's show will kick off the festival.
"It's going to be pretty down and dirty jazz and some really great blues stuff," Lawrence said. "The tenor sax and the organ really lend themselves to that. We are also going to have a vocalist with us, so we'll be able to really take it to the next level."
For more information and the full schedule, check out the Outpost's Web site at Outpostspace.org.
