Freewheeling and still free Northfield Jazz Festival opens this weekend

JC Sanford is a meticulous person. He has been enmeshed in the minutiae as well as the joy of music nearly all of his 56 years, as a student, trombonist, composer, teacher, conductor, arranger and administrator. He has assembled, scored for and conducted big bands, applied for grants, fulfilled commissions and co-founded federations for composers in both New York and Minnesota. 

But until recently, delving into the dicey details of food trucks, port-o-potties and weather insurance was never on his scorecard. 

“I never in my life thought I’d be booking a food truck, nevermind thinking, ‘OK, are two taco trucks enough, or should it be something else?’ Or that we needed more portable toilets than the ones already in the park, and that some need to be available for handicapped people,” Sanford said, adding with a mixture of wry humor and earnest honesty, “This stuff has been a real area of growth for me.”

Sanford is the primary engine behind the Northfield Jazz Festival, which will be held for the third time this weekend, beginning Friday night, in the college town 40 miles south of the Twin Cities where he went to high school and where he returned a decade ago to decompress and raise his then-infant daughter. 

Two years ago, the festival was christened as a day-long affair featuring three Northfield-based groups, underwritten by a Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council (SEMAC) grant that Sanford secured. Last year, working with the Northfield Arts Guild, he was able to triple the budget, expanding the fest to three days and boosting the local program with a nationally renowned headliner and some talent from the Twin Cities. 

This weekend, thanks to grants Sanford was able to scour from the Minnesota State Arts Board and Arts Experience, the festival can retain some popular burgeoning traditions, further beef up its musical offerings and allow Sanford and a cadre of volunteers to showcase smoother management borne of trial-and-error lessons from the previous two years. All events will remain free to the public.

The headliner is pianist Christian Sands, who at age 37 has already been nominated for multiple Grammys. My first exposure to Sands was at the 2014 Detroit Jazz Festival as part of the Christian McBride Trio with drummer Ulysses Owens. McBride apologized to the intimate outdoor audience for being a little under the weather that evening, which enabled Sands to steal the show, reshaping a set of standards with phenomenal gusto and precocity. He will play in the First United Church of Christ at 7:30 p.m., preceded by a master class Sands will conduct at 4 p.m,.

Sanford has wisely realized the diverse range of taste that exists in Northfield despite its relatively small size (last measured at about 20,000, including the 5,000 or so students from Carleton and St. Olaf). For the second festival a year ago, there was the last-minute addition of the local Strawberry Jazz Collective, a group that plays and sings vintage jazz standards with the sort of jaunty aplomb that motivates swing dancers. 

“They packed the Grand Event Center and it was a lot of fun, so we’re doing the same thing this year, opening the festival with them on a Friday night,” Sanford enthused. “In addition to their own group, they are bringing in the Bend in the River Big Band, so it should be a real blowout that first night. 

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“It is also a great way to get the locals who know these folks to be more attuned to events happening the rest of the weekend with artists from the Twin Cities and elsewhere they might not otherwise be aware are coming.” 

Before Sands performs on Saturday, the duo of Judi Vinar and David Stanoch will play at the Northfield Arts Guild Theater at 1 p.m., and the Dale Alexander Trio will be at the Northfield Public Library at 2:30 p.m.. 

Except for the Sands solo performance, all the sets are scheduled to last for an hour in venues situated around town so that people can, as Sanford put it, “stumble into things or purposefully walk from one thing to another.” 

Sunday will retain the template established at the inaugural festival: Three acts performing outdoors in Way Park within a mobile bandshell known as the Showmobile. The Michael Cain Trio, well-known to Twin Cities jazz buffs, will open at 1 p.m., followed by the Charles Gorczynsky Tango Quartet at 2:20 p.m.. Then, at 4:30, Sanford and his wife, composer Asuka Kikatani, will play with the Inatnas Orchestra, a big band they founded specifically to learn and play their music. On that count, Kikatani is at least Sanford’s equal, with her latest of many triumphs being a premiere of one of her pieces by the well-regarded Third Coast Percussion in Chicago last month. 

A highlight of many Inatnas gigs is the appearance of trumpeter Russ Johnson, a 23-year mainstay of the New York City jazz scene before transplanting to Chicago shortly before Sanford and Kikatani moved to Northfield. Their many years together in clubs and on bandstands in the Big Apple generated a fierce loyalty, and his clarion tone and intimate knowledge of the Inatnas playbook makes him an invaluable addition. 

Sanford is also excited by the presence of vocalist Anya Menk, whom he taught at Gustavus Adolphus in nearby St. Peter back in 2019 and who later went on to study with Sanford’s mentor, the pianist Danilo Perez. Menk possesses a distinctive vocalese style and will be featured on the closing song of the Inatnas set, an arrangement Sanford did for the vocalist Gretchen Parlato at a recent Twin Cities gig. Menk will also conduct a vocalist masterclass at the Hot Spot Music Studio at 11 a.m. on Sunday.

The festival will conclude in the time-honored tradition of all multi-day jazz shindigs, with a jam session hosted by the Blue Ox Trio at Imminent Brewing beginning at 6 p.m.

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When I interviewed Sanford in 2019 for a story in the Star Tribune about jazz artists who were successful in larger, more prestigious environments but had chosen to move back to Minnesota, he was just getting reacquainted with Northfield. A full decade later, a lot has changed.

The daughter he and Kikatani brought to Northfield for a quality yet affordable education is now 11. Last year, his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and is now in assisted living while he and his family live in her home. 

When I asked him how Northfield has changed since his high school years, and since he first moved back in 2016, his love of the area shone through. 

“It is definitely much more diverse than when I went to high school here, for all kinds of reasons. But in a lot of ways it hasn’t changed that much. It has always been a community that really appreciated the arts. The Arts Guild is still really important – part of an essential artistic core of what happens in town. They bring in professional singers from the Twin Cities and try to make sure music is involved in many different kinds of events that happen in the community and downtown.”

The city’s farmer’s market hosts musicians every weekend, too, he said. On July 4, Sanford played there with keyboardist  Ted Godbout to promote the festival. “And the weekend of the festival, (vibraphonist) Dave Hagedorn, who originally proposed the idea of an outdoor festival during Covid, will be playing.” 

Sanford does acknowledge that there are some inevitable, classic “town versus gown” tensions between the colleges and longtime residents. There are issues over taxes and land expansion when the colleges require buy-in or bureaucratic cooperation from local government. And the colleges could do more to engage the community and alert them to programs and performances occurring on their campuses. 

To practice what he preaches, Sanford vigorously promotes the festival and then solicits public opinion among those who attend about what can be done better – which is what drives some of the discussions and learning curves around food trucks and public restrooms.  

“It is very easy to communicate with the people who work for the city departments,” he emphasized. “They tell me the steps to do what I have to do. And the Department of Tourism here in Northfield has been helpful and enthusiastic because we’re all going for the same goal – to bring people to Northfield. Not only to enhance the lives of people who live here but also bring people to see what a great little town we have.

“The main thing for me – if we ever had to start charging people, I don’t think I could keep doing this. We want everybody to come and any amount of money (being spent) is a barrier to that. So most everything is funded by grant money and then there are people who donate money that round out the edges,” Sanford said. “The idea is, everything is free. If you show up, you have nothing to lose.” 

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