Monterey at 50: Legendary jazz festival celebrates its legacy while looking to the future

Dave Brubeck has played the world's leading concert halls before audiences that have included presidents and kings. But no performance has had a longer lasting impact than the one he gave 50 years ago for city council members from a picturesque California coastal town once known as the Sardine Capital of the World and immortalized in John Steinbeck's "Cannery Road."

That performance helped pave the way for the first Monterey Jazz Festival, which today claims the title of the world's longest consecutively running jazz festival. (The Newport Jazz Festival though older missed several years because of riots that shut it down.)

This month, the 86-year-old Brubeck will be making his 14th appearance at the festival he helped launch when he performs at the 50th annual Monterey Jazz Festival, which is expected to draw more than 40,000 people from Sept. 21-23.

"I have many reasons for returning to Monterey — the excitement, the camaraderie, remembrances of my youth, my connection with its history and the challenge to try to bring something new each time I appear," said Brubeck.

Brubeck went to Monterey in 1957 as a favor to disc jockey Jimmy Lyons, who discovered the jazz pianist at a 1949 San Francisco concert and arranged a successful audition for a weekly NBC radio show.

In the early 1950s, Lyons and San Francisco Chronicle jazz writer Ralph J. Gleason had discussed the notion of holding an outdoor festival by the sea in "a sylvan setting with lots of trees and grass ... away from the sultry, dark, webby setting of clubs."

Inspired by the success of the first U.S. jazz festival held in Newport, R.I., in 1954, Lyons and Gleason decided that the 20-acre Monterey County Fairgrounds would make an ideal locale for a West Coast festival.

They enlisted the support of local business owners looking to boost tourism to replace the disappearing sardine industry, but still needed to convince a skeptical city council. Brubeck, who grew up on a cattle ranch about 100 miles inland, offered to help because he shared Lyons' interest in building more respect for jazz and a wider audience.

"Jimmy asked my quartet to come and play in a little exhibition room at the fairgrounds that was a place where farmers showed their produce," Brubeck told The Associated Press. "It was a room with a cement floor and whitewashed ceiling and walls.