John Gill Jazz Concert at Bickford Theater

John Gill and his "Yerba Buena Stompers" celebrate the centennial of Lu Watters, a West Coast Revival jazz pioneer, with a hot two-trumpet front line.

The band features Bria Skonberg and Simon Wettenhall (trumpets), Pete Martinez (clarinet), Jim Fryer (trombone), Brian Nalepka (tuba), Conal Fowkes (piano), and Kevin Dorn (drums).  

West Coast Revival is peppy music with complex arrangements that are difficult to play for those unfamiliar with the genre.  It will remind you why you became interested in jazz.

Lu Watters, along with noted sidemen Bob Scobey and Turk Murphy (who later departed to lead their own bands in a similar mode), created the West Coast Revival style of traditional jazz. They took a back‑to‑the‑roots approach, modeling their instrumen­tation after that of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, including a two‑trumpet front line which, in the case of the original, fea­tured Joe Oliver himself and a young Louis Armstrong. Old tunes were resurrected, and new ones written in the same style, such that a vastly different repertoire is heard west of the Rockies even today, with festivals that considerably outdraw their East­ern counterparts due to the vitality of the music presented. 

Make time for this concert to see why traditional jazz is still so very popular along the Pacific.