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When I arrived in Atlanta in 1988 it didn’t take me long to realize that the annual Atlanta Jazz Festival was something very special. At that time I was a new jazz student. Just before leaving the Bay Area, California, I was just getting started in high end audio equipment where acoustic instrumentation is preferred to electronic and I was learning REAL jazz from my fusion jazz (Weather Report and Return to Forever) reference and my funk, R&B roots. In frequenting our annual jazz festival I quickly discovered our small but loyal jazz community. I recall the first jazz club I regularly frequented, Just Jazz was located just off Peachtree, which opened right after the death of the great trumpeter Miles Davis. The house band featured an extremely talented pianist named Johnny Oneal. I remember the first time I checked out Dante’s Down the Hatch restaurant in Buckhead, and heard Paul Mitchell play piano, who was one of Atlanta’s best kept jazz treasures. I used to look forward to Jazz at the Penta Hotel, later the Renaissance Hotel, after the jazz ended in the park where the jam session featured artists who played in the park alongside many of our own local stars. Once the festival jam sessions moved to Churchill Grounds I began my tradition of ending my jazz festival with a Cuban cigar and feeling a part of something very special, Atlanta’s jazz community.

I have been a “special” fan of music since the age of five and vividly remember MY first lp record purchase in East Oakland in 1972, Curtis Mayfield’s, “Super Fly” movie soundtrack. The guy behind the counter looked at the cover then to my mother, she shrugged her shoulders then looked at me and I looked at him like, “put the record in the bag fool!” I new what I liked at an early age and I also knew what was good. I loved rap too which was actually my generation. In high school I could mix and scratch and work a cross fader seamlessly. I was exposed to a wealth of diverse music in the Bay Area but in the pursuit of better sounding equipment I realized that the highest quality stereo is designed to play acoustic music and I began to learn jazz. The great electric jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius was the first jazz artist that I had ever actually HEARD play in 1986 as a part of the jazz super group “Weather Report” in the audiophile store named “Pro Audio” in Berkeley, California. Nothing else ever made such an impact on my ability to focus in on a “jazz solo” as the notes he played. After that, I became like a sponge for jazz music.