Jazz Festival is back in New Smyrna Beach after two-year hiatus

If you’re not in the mood for the heavy metal sound at Welcome to Rockville this weekend, you might want to head on down to New Smyrna Beach for the three-day 2022 Jazz Festival.

After a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, the Jazz Festival is back, and bigger than ever, according to organizer and founder Marc Monteson.

Usually a September event, the Jazz Festival takes place this weekend, Friday through Sunday. “We took it out of hurricane season and football season this year,” Monteson said earlier this week.

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The festival will include some 32 venues, with 20 or more outdoors and 10 or 11 inside clubs, Monteson said. And it will feature mostly central Florida musicians, from Orlando and up and down the east coast.

The festival started in 2001, Monteson said, after he had been to the Church Street Station in downtown Orlando in the 1990s and thought the jazz concept would work well in New Smyrna Beach.

“I love music and I love jazz a lot,” he said.

At first, some of the venues were skeptical, he said, but after they saw the popularity and the turnout, they were hooked. The Jazz Festival has been a yearly highlight since then, until the pandemic hit.

The festival has grown from clubs on Flagler Avenue to include Third Avenue, Canal Street, South Atlantic Avenue and the North Causeway, and this year Riverside Drive and Route 44 were added.

Greg Parnell, a drummer, has been with the festival “for a long time, since about ’05,” he said. While he has played with different groups, trios and quartets, either as a side man or as a leader, he said, this year he’s with a seven-piece group, the Greg Parnell Septet, playing a tribute to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass at Clancy’s Cantina on Flagler Avenue.

“The Tijuana Brass is based on a mariachi sound, and Clancy’s is the perfect place for that,” he said. They’ll be appearing at Clancy’s on Saturday from 1-4 p.m., and then, he said, “the bass player and I have to run over to Marriott Springhill Suites to play with the James Hall Trio.”

A resident of Winter Park, Parnell has been with the Glenn Miller Orchestra since 1996, and is now the president of Glenn Miller Productions, which has its headquarters in Lake Mary.

Linda Cole, of Palm Coast, is a well-known jazz singer who will appear Sunday with the Josh Bowlus Trio at Limoncello South on East Third Street for a three-hour set.

"I've been a part of the festival for at least 18 of the 20 years," she said this week. "We're doing Irving Berlin, and jazz royalty like Ray Charles and Duke Ellington."

A stickler for her music's background, she does a brief history as she introduces each song.

"We're standing on the shoulders of the greats," she said.

The schedule for the Jazz Festival is packed, starting with a free kick-off New Orleans music concert by the U.S. Navy Band Southeast at the Marine Discovery Center Amphitheatre at 6 p.m. Friday. Then Saturday, from noon to 10 p.m., and Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., jazz musicians and groups will play at restaurants and clubs up and down Flagler Avenue, Canal Street, Orange Street and South Atlantic Avenue. And admission to all the venues is free.

“This is one of the neatest things in Florida, and it’s a free event,” Parnell said. “You basically go up and down Flagler Avenue and Canal Street to listen to music for free. What a great thing for this area.”

Cole agreed.

"It's a passion, it's my life, it's my bloodline," she said. "It's going to be wonderful."

For a full schedule of events, visit nsbjazzfest.com.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: New Smyrna Beach welcomes 2022 Jazz Festival after 2-year hiatus