Music Festival Highlights Cross-border Heritage

Co-curators of the San Diego-Tijuana Int’l Jazz Fest Daniel Atkinson and Julian Plascencia. Photo by Manuel Cruces Camberos.

Despite the imposition of an international border more than 170 years ago, San Diego and Tijuana have continued to share a musical heritage, including jazz. The third annual San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival scheduled October 1-4 with concerts on both sides of the border will celebrate this historical synergy. For decades, musicians from both metropolitan areas have crossed back and forth to take advantage of gig opportunities, despite the border hassles.

“What’s really motivating the programming of this festival is to take a look at artists who have something to say that’s relevant to where we are,” said Executive Producer Daniel Atkinson. Atkinson, longtime presenter of music programs at the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla, organizes the SDTJ fest in conjunction with Julian Plascencia, director of the Tijuana Jazz & Blues Festival.

“We got together and I said, ‘What about putting together a festival on both sides?’” Atkinson said.

He emphasizes the region’s cross-border musical collaboration stems from the Prohibition Era in the U.S. from 1920 to 1933. Then, thousands of Americans, including the Hollywood set, traveled south of the border seeking booze and entertainment.

“What really drove Tijuana and what made Tijuana into a city was Prohibition and that’s what attracted musicians there because they had places where they could be paid to play,” Atkinson said. “Part of the history is a binational history. It was Mexico responding to the U.S. having Prohibition. It was a place where there was a lot of music happening.”

Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz, opened up a bar in the early 1920s in Tijuana that undoubtedly featured Morton playing piano and other musicians and bands. That history inspired Atkinson in the festival’s first year to commission two pieces of music dedicated to Morton.

Binational Student Ensemble Tijuana. Photo by Manuel Cruces Camberos

“It happened that 2024 was the 100th anniversary of when he was living and playing and composing in Tijuana, which I think we can claim to be the origin of jazz in the binational region.”

Last year, Atkinson said, the festival celebrated the 100th birthday of saxophonist James Moody, who gigged in San Diego during the latter years of his life.

Headliners were Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Ensemble and the Fandango Fronterizo Colectivo, which had collaborated on the celebrated album “Fandango at the Border,” recorded both in Tijuana and San Diego. That recording led to an award-winning documentary that explored the influence of the son jarocho genre across the landscape of northern Mexico.

This year’s festival expands on the theme of son jarocho, a style that emanated from Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico coast and spread through this region and the world.

“La Bamba” and “El Cascabel” are prime examples of the genre, inspired by the rhythms of enslaved people of African origin in the Vera Cruz region during the Spanish conquest.

Lucia. Photo by Servin Lainez.

While established as an outstanding jazz vocalist, Lucia Gutierrez will return to her son jarocho roots with her combo Lucia and the Familia Gutierrez, featuring her father, Ramon Gutierrez on vocals and requinto. Both he and Lucia will engage in zapateado, Spanish for tap-dancing, an intrinsic aspect of son jarocho.

Another perspective in this year’s festival will be an emphasis on composer, band leader, and bassist Charles Mingus’ forays into music emanating from across the border. The Mingus Dynasty, an all-star outfit that keeps alive the spirit and repertoire of the legendary jazzman, is scheduled for two performances doing pieces from Mingus’s groundbreaking Tijuana Moods album plus his Cumbia and Jazz Fusion opus.

Born in Nogales, Arizona, and raised in Los Angeles, Mingus enjoyed traveling down the coast to experience the exuberance of Tijuana, as elucidated in his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog.

Cumbia and Jazz Fusion explores the pervasive influence of the rhythmic groove associated with Columbia and its permeation through other genres. That composition and tunes from Tijuana Moods were featured on a CD by the tribute orchestra, the Mingus Big Band, titled Que Viva Mingus!

Appropriately, the cover art features a border wall, with the graffito “Libertad Ahora” and “Wanted” posters with drawings of Mingus donning a sombrero.

In keeping with the cross-border theme, the festival launches Thursday, October 1, at the Quartyard in downtown San Diego with a performance by the Binantional Youth Ensemble, a coalition of students from the Young Lions Jazz Conservatory and the Instituto Contemporaneous de Musica de Baja California. Bandleader and trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos of San Diego leads the former while Ivan Trujillo directs the latter. Also on the bill are Colectivo Fronterizo with rapper Femina Fatal and Jungle Fire.

The venue shifts Friday, October 2, to Tijuana at Avenida Revolucion and Calle 4, with performances by Colectivo Fronterizo and Femina Fatal, followed by Senales Selanea and Charlie Chavez y su Afrotuko.

Chavez and Afrotuko open Saturday October 3 at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido.

Binational Student Ensemble Tijuana. Photo by Manuel Cruces Camberos

Pianist Danilo Perez and the SDSU Jazz Ensembles will follow with a student combo led by Castellanos, a quartet featuring Castellanos, SDSU jazz studies director Brian Levy, Luke Little on bass and Mark Ferber on drums. Then, SDSU Jazz Ensemble 1 will come on under the direction of Karl Soukup. Subsequently, Gutierrez and the Familia Gutierrez, Mingus Dynasty and Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band will play on the outdoor stage,

The festival will conclude on Tijuana Sunday wth appearances by the Ensemble Blue Binacional Juvenile, the Gutierrez group, Brian Blade & the Fellowship Band, Mingus Dynasty, and Danilo Perez y La Covacha Big Band. Some of the events cost admissions while others are free of charge. For a complete listing, visit sdtjjazz.org.

Atkinson said Blade, the drummer and bandleader, had asked if the promoter had any dates available in early October. The former was happy to accommodate given what he had experienced when he previously had brought the Fellowship to San Diego.

“I personally think it’s one of the greatest bands I’ve ever presented,” he said. “It’s one of those bands so tight that the can be loose. They were just on fire.”

A former administrator at UCSD, Atkinson said that after three decades of presenting jazz concerts, holding a full-fledged multi-day festival is a dream come true: “This is what you could call my encore career.”