If Mobile’s annual Gulf Coast Ethnic and Heritage Jazz Festival was just one night of poetry and three nights of music, it’d be a good time.
But by the time the public entertainment starts on Thursday, July 24, some participants will already have spent two weeks living up to the “heritage” part of the name. That was evident one day last week at the History Museum of Mobile, when Andrew Ayers and others conducted a session of the Marcus Johnson Summer Jazz Camp, a program named for a founder of the Bay City Brass Band who died in 2014 at 43.
Ayers was leading an ensemble of about two dozen middle- and high-school-age participants. Four days in, they were learning to take turns improvising solos as the group vamped through verses and choruses. “Everybody say less is more,” Ayers said, after one ragged but promising session…