JAZZ REVIEW : The Big Beat Goes On in Sacramento

SACRAMENTO —  Sacramento’s Jazz Jubilee, launched 20 years ago, is the largest in the country, perhaps in the world. It’s an orgy of traditional and mainstream music this year offering more than 120 bands--count ‘em, 120--tootling away at 42 locations from a paddle-wheel steamer in the river to a parking lot beneath the I-5.

The festival kicked off with a parade Friday morning (two elephants, bands playing, ladies in fringed dresses twirling pink parasols). Roger Krum, the event’s executive director since 1988, who also plays bass in Sacramento’s Fulton Street Band, guesses that by this afternoon’s finale, total attendance may hit a record 105,000.

“Dixieland” was dropped from the festival title a few years ago to enhance a wider range of jazz up to, but not including, bop, although the attentive listener may hear the occasional flatted fifth in solo work.

But trad still reigns, the domestic groups like High Sierra and the Hot Frogs augmented these days by immensely popular foreign groups like the crisp, hard-driving Allotria Band from Munich, Fat Sam’s Timpani Five-sounding group from Scotland, Greentown from Slovenia and the vigorous Paco Gatsby group from Guatemala, whose Latin-flavored originals are a tasty change from “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue.”

Significantly, there are 20 youth bands here, fostered by the Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society’s year-round program of classes, scholarships and a summer music camp. One of the groups, Pearl Street--its members now graduate music students--gigs around the country. The young players improvise with assurance and freshness, draw young listeners and suggest that the past has a future.

Guest stars include Frankie Laine, the new Ink Spots and actress Molly Ringwald, who first sang at the jubilee with her father Bob Ringwald’s Great Pacific Jazz Band when she was 7 years old. Her first appearance Saturday drew a waiting line that stretched from a hotel ballroom down the street for two blocks.