If you live in the DC area you know this is a busy season for festivals and street fairs, with organizers trying to capitalize on these fine, mild days at summer's end. Just in jazz, we had the Silver Spring and Rosslyn festivals last weekend, while all this week the rapidly growing Duke Ellington Jazz Festival has been putting on concerts and club shows all over town. As you might guess from the festival's name, this year's edition has been dedicated to tributes to -- Dizzy Gillespie.

 

I wanted to draw your attention to Sunday's free all-day show at the Sylvan Theater at the foot of the Washington Monument. Sunday's show features some Latin jazz artists -- Eddie Palmieri, Paquito D'Rivera, Flora Purim and Airto -- as well as a big band filled with big names. Here is the whole schedule.

 

We went last Saturday up to Baltimore to catch another big band. The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which is Wynton Marsalis' outfit, opened the concert series at Shriver Hall, on the campus of Johns Hopkins University. Although there were 15 guys on stage, I wouldn't really call it a big band show. There was the occasional opening flourish featuring entire sections, but most tunes quickly became a matter of soloists taking turns playing over a trio accompaniment. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

The group played a long medley of songs by John Coltrane, impressionistic portraits of Monet and Dali by saxophonist Ted Nash and Bud Powell's "Un Poco Loco." Marsalis has managed to maintain a loyal cadre of talented musicians for this project over the years. For me, the easy standout was Sherman Irby, an alto sax player who began a solo with a growl imitating a black church shout-out. It became a classic example of a slow blues gradually becoming louder, faster, more forceful and completely swinging.

 

One of the frustrations of this band is having Marsalis, the genial host, on stage but playing comparatively little. He offered one solo that was an amazing technical display of rapid playing but not especially interesting. (The other star in the trumpet section was Marcus Printup, whose main solo also consisted of a lot of notes but not many ideas. At one point, he was basically running up and down a scale. But he played it loud and with gusto and the crowd are loving it.) Marsalis did close the show with a wonderful gut-bucket blues, wandering around the front of the stage and waving around his plunger mute.

 

Despite my quibbles, the playing was mainly excellent throughout. My attention was often not on the soloists but on pianist Dan Nimmer, who dropped some really interesting chords in between the soloists' phrases, often just behind the beat and sometimes in a close-cousin key. I just looked up what I wrote about his appearance with Marsalis at the Silver Spring jazz fest two years ago:

 

The most exciting player, though, was pianist Dan Nimmer, who I had never heard of before. He's a terrific young white player. His best moment came during the mournful tune, "St. James' Infirmary," when he played a painfully slow solo -- his tempo threw off the drummer and bass player -- constructing it out of occasional, erratically placed single notes. He stripped the tune bare and made you think about it anew -- that's what I call jazz.

 

Nothing like a cliche to get you out of a paragraph, I always say.

 

Shriver Hall sits right on the quad at Johns Hopkins. As a nice touch, they had a student band playing outside the hall before the show and then broadcast the Lincoln Center group's performance onto a screen out there, to facilitate the college students in their famous lounging about on the lawn. They put out free sodas and chips and everything.

 

It was a different crowd inside than you would get at, say, the Kennedy Center. More people had dragged along their kids, there were more obviously white ethnic folks and there were far fewer cell phones in use on entrance and departure.