San Diego Jazz Fest conundrum

Surely, I am not the only one who did a double-take after learning the San Diego Jazz Festival will be held this weekend at La Costa Resort and Spa.

But this event has no relation to the sadly long-defunct San Diego Jazz Festival, which — between 1979 and 1987 — brought such uncompromising American music giants as Art Blakey, Betty Carter, Lionel Hampton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and dozens more to town.

It was the brainchild of Rob Hagey, who in 1984 launched Street Scene as a fundraiser for the San Diego Jazz Festival, having no idea that the latter would soon eclipse the former. His festival and Street Scene are now, sadly, both defunct.

The new San Diego Jazz Festival, which takes place Friday through Sunday, is sponsored by Payne Pest Management. Its lineup includes such talented artists as versatile percussion master Sheila E. and such veteran R&B vocal dynamos as Phil Perry, Jeffrey Osborne and former Take 6 mainstay Brian McKnight. However, unless any of the festival’s acts pursue covert musical careers under other names, not one of this weekend’s 23 scheduled artists perform jazz.

That technicality aside, nearly all of them do fall under the umbrella of what was one called “smooth jazz.” That largely jazz-free radio format was pioneered in the 1980s by San Diego’s KIFM-FM and became a nationwide phenomenon. A slick fusion of instrumental pop, funk and R&B, smooth jazz appropriated the prestige conferred by the word jazz, while avoiding jazz’s harmonic sophistication, rhythmic dexterity, emotional depth and improvisational intricacies.

Many of the artists in this weekend’s festival lineup were KIFM mainstays until early 2011, when anemic ratings prompted KIFM to abandon the format. This explains why the festival’s two radio sponsors are 94.7 The Wave (one of the few remaining major-market smooth jazz stations) and urban-contemporary KLJH 102.3, both based in Los Angeles.

Smooth jazz has also been marketed, perhaps even more misleadingly, as “contemporary jazz.” Under either name, it is ailing.

In 2011, the four-day Oasis Contemporary Jazz Awards (a national event that was to take place in San Diego) was canceled due to low ticket sales. Rick Braun, who performs at La Costa Sunday, is one of many smooth jazz artists to move away from the format. A recent Jazz Times magazine article bore the headline: “Crossing Over: Is Smooth Jazz Dead?”

And yet... in October, early smooth jazz champion Art Good, a former KIFM radio host, will stage the 27th annual edition of his Catalina Island JazzTrax festival. The lineup includes singer Perry, saxophonist Euge Groove and keyboardist Jonathan Fritzen, all of whom are playing at this weekend’s La Costa festival. Meanwhile, San Diego-based Smooth Jazz News, which is nationally distributed, has been publishing since 1990.

It is unwise to make a final prognosis for the format based on this weekend’s San Diego Jazz Festival. But how the event fares should offer some insight about a music whose recent path has been anything but smooth.