JazzFest Michigan: Acoustic, electric and eclectic

At an ox roast in rural Alcona County many years ago, the lady standing next to me asked, “Excuse me, do you serve anything besides ox?”

Purists once bristled when a jazz festival programmed anything less than 100% ox — er, jazz — and begrudged even icons like Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin their rightful turns on the stage.

Maybe they still bristle, but who’s listening? While the East Lansing Summer Solstice Jazz Festival takes tender care of the hardcore, Michigan State University-adjacent jazz crowd, Old Town’s JazzFest Michigan (formerly Lansing JazzFest) tosses out a proudly eclectic menu this weekend, with flavors of blues, R&B, folk-adjacent, pop-ish, hip-hop-ish and hard-to-pin-down performers in addition to the straight-ahead stalwarts jazz aficionados love, such as MSU jazz studies saxophone giant Walter Blanding.

That jazz-plus-everything feeling doesn’t only apply to the festival as a whole. Each of the three performers singled out in the following stories for closer attention exemplifies this eclectic spirit on their own.

Sinewy, grooving jazz machine 496 West brings currents of smooth jazz, R&B and gospel music alongside a mighty blast of “energy jazz” in the spirit of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. New York-based trio Pickle Mafia hides its formidable jazz chops under a bracing, multi-spray showerhead of classical piano, electronic dance music, hip-hop, straight-up pop, movie tunes and even theatrical touches such as flying pineapples. (Probably a one-shot, but who knows?) Traverse City-based pianist and composer Jeff Haas folds classical artistry and the Jewish flavor of his youth in Detroit into an all-star group that’s been enriching the state’s jazz scene for decades.

That’s just three out of dozens of musicians set to light up the streets of Old Town and the epicenter of the festival, the UrbanBeat venue on Turner Street, where many of this weekend’s performers are frequent visitors.