Cavalcade of Jazz kicks off with opening ceremony

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The Wilkes-Barre Cavalcade of Jazz kicked off Friday night with an opening ceremony featuring live performances and some historical context surrounding the Wyoming Valley’s jazz scene.

The opening ceremony, held in the F.M. Kirby Center Chandelier Lobby, was only the weekend’s first event celebrating jazz music in Wilkes-Barre.

In addition to shows popping up at local establishments throughout the city over the course of the weekend, the Grammy-winning musician Arturo Sandoval will serve as the festival’s headliner with a Saturday night show at the F.M. Kirby Center.

The Cavalcade of Jazz is something of a continuation of a bygone era, in which jazz music was rather popular in Luzerne County. Guest speakers Erika Funke and Marko Marcinko told stories at the opening ceremony, detailing the 1951 establishment of The Cavalcade of Dixieland Jazz, which has since folded.

The inaugural Cavalcade of Dixieland Jazz, an event which is honored with a plaque on Wilkes-Barre’s Public Square, is sometimes regarded as the country’s first jazz festival. It even preceded the historic Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island.

“Bringing this back, and getting Wilkes-Barre back in the game with a little bit of a jazz scene, I think, is very appropriate,” said Marcinko, citing the city’s rich history in establishing the very concept of a jazz festival.

Jazz or not, Alan K. Stout, executive director of the Luzerne County Convention and Visitors Bureau, said that the festival will go a long way in helping the image of the area appear more vibrant to those within and outside of Luzerne County.

“If you want to project a positive image of your community…” Stout said, “then the people who live here have to feel good about the community.”

Stout referenced the recent announcements of other concerts in Downtown Wilkes-Barre, such as Starship’s scheduled free concert and the Rockin’ the River series, as opportunities to do similarly positive things for the area’s image.

The performing artist at the opening ceremony was the Joe Michaels Trio, headed by the Kingston musician from whom the ensemble takes its name. As a member of the tight-knit local jazz community, Michaels was planning on checking out some of the other live music selections downtown Wilkes-Barre had to offer over the weekend.

For most of Michaels’ time as a musician, the jazz community of the Wyoming Valley was lost in the shuffle, with the Poconos being the closest area with any clear hunger for the genre. Now, with a jazz festival coming back to Wilkes-Barre, musicians like Michaels have the chance to play a little closer to home.

“A lot of musicians don’t really play in town because there’s not a lot of venues that really want to have jazz, or there’s not a lot of jazz listeners. So us jazz musicians really have to travel outside of the area,” Michaels said. “It’s nice to actually play a jazz gig in basically my hometown.”

And he did. Michaels and his bandmates began their set Friday night with a pair of Duke Ellington standards and, with that, they signaled the organized return of jazz music to the Wyoming Valley.