Apparently, the Capital Jazz Festival’s 50,000 visitors never got the memo that the nation is in the throes of an ill economy. A colorful sea of humanity flooded the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., a distant suburb of Washington, D.C., as the likes of Chaka Khan, Will Downing, George Duke, En Vogue, Peabo Bryson, Regina Bell, Norman Brown, Pieces of a Dream, SMV, Roy Ayers, Lalah Hathaway, Mike Phillips and Chuck Brown delivered a potpourri of smooth and contemporary jazz and R&B music over three days.
“In this area, we have a high concentration of educated and upper-income adults, particularly in the African American community, to whom jazz tends to appeal,” Cliff Hunte, founder and producer of the Capital Jazz Fest, told the Washington Times.
The Capital Jazz Festival attracts aficionados from 44 states and has been called the “Woodstock of jazz festivals” by guitarist Chuck Loeb. It remains robust after 17 years, despite the fact that a host of other national jazz festivals have shut down, either temporarily or permanently, due to the prolonged economic downturn. The Capital Jazz Festival is considered one of the pre-eminent urban music festivals in the nation.
As Will Downing told rolling out: “I’ve been coming here for over 20 years, and it’s always a great place to play because it’s [an] amazing festival. It was a very exciting day. It’s a great music event so you can’t go wrong.”
Based on the overwhelming turnout, coupled with the top-tier lineup that it attracts yearly, the Capital Jazz Festival should remain healthy for the foreseeable future. –terry shropshire
