Palm Springs Jazz Festival returns May 15 with Christian McBride, Matthew Whitaker

During a recent visit to the Plaza Theatre, Palm Springs International Jazz Festival founder Michael Seligman began clapping his hands and was in awe of the reverb from the walls.

"It's the perfect jazz theater," he thought.

On May 15, the venue will host the Palm Springs International Jazz Festival featuring performances by the biggest names of the genre, including Christian McBride and Inside Straight, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Bill Charlap, Matthew Whitaker and the Lance Conrad Quartet.

Jazz is considered a dying music genre and accounted for 1% of music sales in 2014. But Seligman told The Desert Sun he believes it's worth keeping alive and called it "America's music."

Seligman is partnering with the Oasis Music Festival organized by Palm Springs Life in presenting the event. Publisher Frank Jones approached him to present one day of jazz as part of the festival.

The Oasis Music Festival aims to help local music venues and Palm Springs businesses recover financial losses due to the pandemic, and a portion of the proceeds will go toward the restoration of the Plaza Theatre.

"(Jones) helped us out during the pandemic, which was very nice of him," Seligman said. "We met with him and said one of the things we insisted on is keeping our own identity as the Palm Springs International Jazz Festival."

The Palm Springs International Jazz Festival isn't the only large-scale event Seligman has produced. He spent 38 years as a producer for the Oscars, as well as presidential galas and the inaugurations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

The 86-year-old lights up when he talks about his love of jazz. When he was 16, he frequented the Boston jazz club called Storyville. "They'd kick me out for being underage," Seligman told The Desert Sun in 2019.

The festival was scheduled for last January but was canceled due to a rise in COVID-19 cases during the omicron variant surge, which made them lose Afro-Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, and former Miles Davis keyboardist John Beasley.

"A lot of the jazz stars are (touring) Europe right now," Seligman said.

The 2019 inaugural event at the Annenberg Theater featured performances by Sandoval, Beasley, vocalists Stacey Kent, Tierney Sutton and René Marie.

The festival features some of the biggest names in jazz

The 2022 Palm Springs International Jazz Festival again features some of the biggest names in jazz, along with local guitarist Lance Conrad, who will perform with three of his classmates from the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music.

Known for sharing the stage with Sting, The Roots and Paul McCartney, McBride has won eight Grammy Awards. He's also the host of the radio programs "The Lowdown: Conversations With Christian" on SiriusXM Satellite Radio and "Jazz Night In America" on National Public Radio.

At 21, Whitaker has already performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center and the Apollo Theater. The pianist was born blind and is the subject of the 2015 short documentary "Thrive," which was filmed when he was 12.

"When (Whitaker) plays the piano, the visual cortex in his brain lights up as a seeing person's would, and no one can explain it," Seligman said. "He loves jazz and he's terrific."

Bridgewater, who performs standards and jazz classics, has won three Grammy Awards and is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, and Charlap has provided his talent as a pianist to artists such as Phil Woods and Wynton Marsalis, as well as legends Tony Bennett and Barbra Streisand.

Palm Springs has a rich jazz history

Palm Springs has a storied history with the genre, from the big-band era in the ’40s and ’50s to Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack making Palm Springs their playground in the ’50s and ’60s.

But you can't talk about jazz in Palm Springs without talking about the Chi Chi Club. The famous downtown venue stood at 217 N. Palm Canyon Drive from the ’40s through the ’60s.

The building previously housed a bar, Freeman's Desert Grill, opened by local resident Jack Freeman in 1936. But his business partner, architect Irwin Schuman, renamed it the Chi Chi two years later, according to a Desert Sun column by Nicolette Wenzell of the Palm Springs Historical Society.

Schuman later expanded the venue, transforming it from a small bar into an extravagant nightclub.

In October 1948, the Chi Chi debuted a new theater that could hold 750 people, the Starlite Room. (By comparison, the Annenberg Theater has 430 seats.) Renowned actor and bandleader Desi Arnaz and his 17-piece orchestra played at its debut. A new dining room, The Blue Room, added space for an additional 250 people.

Bill Alexander, a professional drummer, was selected to be the musical director of the Chi Chi's house band. He performed as announcer and bandleader. His five- to nine-piece group opened for acts ranging from jazz legends Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to comics Milton Berle and Red Skelton.

Additional performers included Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn and Palm Springs resident Nat King Cole, according to Tracy Conrad, who is also the president of the Palm Springs Historical Society.

Alexander kept many secrets of famous Palm Springs residents who hung out in the club, according to his 2006 obituary in The Desert Sun. Greg Purdy, the former director of media relations for the Fabulous Palm Springs Follies, a dance and music revue performed at the nearby Plaza Theatre, called him "a repository of all the dirt that happened in this town."

Hoping to capitalize on the city's appetite for jazz, promoter Gene Norman planned to do a three-day jazz festival in Palm Springs in 1958. The first day would feature Dixieland, or traditional jazz, with a performance by Armstrong; the second day would focus on big band and the final day would be devoted to improvisational jazz, according to Conrad.

Mayor Frank Bogert was fine with the festival, but police chief Gus Kettmann was not.

Norman, who had already done several jazz festivals in California, said the Palm Springs festival was aimed at an older crowd over 30. Kettman believed the festival would draw teenagers and "undue exuberance," Conrad wrote in a recent column for The Desert Sun.

The jazz festival never happened. The Desert Sun editorial board even supported the decision to deny the permit, saying the festival would be "lost" on younger visitors.

A few years later, the nightclub scene began to fade and Schulman sold the Chi Chi in 1961, according to Conrad. The club would go through several new owners who transformed the space for a wide range of uses, from a cabaret that showed adult films to a wax museum and a spaghetti restaurant.

In 1984, it was torn down for the Desert Fashion Plaza expansion.

Seligman said he hopes to make the Palm Springs International Jazz Festival "bigger and better" and believes it can attract jazz lovers in Los Angeles and San Diego.

"The biggest jazz festivals are on the west coast," Seligman said. "The Monterey Jazz Festival is big. The Newport Jazz Festival started as a one-day thing and if you look at the lineup this year, they have Norah Jones. It's amazing."

If you go

What: Palm Springs International Jazz Festival

When: May 15

Where: Plaza Theatre, 128 S. Palm Canyon Dr., Palm Springs

Cost: VIP tickets are $350 to $500; single shows are individually priced

More information: oasismusicfestival.com/palm-springs-international-jazz-festival-2022

Previous reporting by Bruce Fessier was used in this report.

Brian Blueskye covers arts and entertainment for the Desert Sun. He can be reached at brian.blueskye@desertsun.com or on Twitter at @bblueskye.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Palm Springs Jazz Festival to return May 15 at Plaza Theatre