Onstage at the Monterey Jazz Festival
This year’s Berklee Monterey Quintet is playing three times on the Monterey Jazz Festival. The first gig is performing for 600 wiggly, middle school music students, at lunchtime, on the day before the festival begins. The show takes place on the Garden Stage, where the group performs again, complete with fifth member Billy Buss, on Friday night.
Real Jazz Program Director Mark Ruffin gets to crux with Roy Guzman after the band’s broadcast recording at Sirius XM. Leo Brouwer, Wes Montgomery, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Scofield, Metheny, and the Berklee in Puerto Rico program; they all came up.
Leader Roy Guzman in Thursday morning's "sunrise" recording session in the Sirius XM Performance Theater studio in Washington.
I’m reminded of the line from Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece” — “on a plane ride so bumpy that I almost cried.” The air is choppy, the seat is flexing, and I’m thinking about how great the last 17 years at Berklee have been. And how much I don’t want them to end here, above the Maryland countryside, in an Airbus.
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