NOTE: “Today” and “tonight” refer to Friday, July 24.
PORT TOWNSEND — In their voices, you can hear the joy.
These players and teachers, together at Centrum’s 41st Jazz Port Townsend festival, are relishing the days and nights of groove, improvisation and freedom.
“Jazz was born here. It represents the melting pot that is America,” said Kim Nazarian — Kim Naz, as she calls herself.
A globetrotting vocalist, Nazarian will sing in the Saturday afternoon concert at Fort Worden State Park’s McCurdy Pavilion, with pianist Eric Reed, bassist Jon Hamar and drummer Jeff Hamilton backing her.
Also on the bill for Saturday’s 1:30 p.m. show are the Brazilian group Trio da Paz and Jazz Port Townsend’s All-Star Big Band led by Bob Mintzer.
Nazarian, Mintzer and the rest are part of the faculty working with some 200 students in Jazz Port Townsend’s workshops this week.
Now they’re ready to stretch out together — on seven downtown stages, in three concerts at McCurdy and in free, public events at Fort Worden today.
This summer camp “is a gathering of some of the top jazz musicians in the world. The faculty is so exciting,” Nazarian said.
“This is one of the best jazz camps in the United States because of the quality of the faculty, from John Clayton on down.”
Clayton, Jazz Port Townsend artistic director for nine years now, takes great pleasure in putting together the Jazz in the Clubs combinations set to play tonight and Saturday night; the Friday Workshop Blowout today; the Maucha Adnet Trio’s “Bossa Always Nova” concert tonight and a Saturday show titled “Sit Down, Hang On.”
Regina Carter is one of the performers Clayton calls “always thrilling.” The jazz violinist, who will play tonight at McCurdy Pavilion and Saturday night at the Rose Theatre, regularly travels across musical boundaries.
Carter has a folk album, 2014’s “Southern Comfort,” as well as “I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey,” a collection of early jazz standards, and “Reverse Thread,” a record full of African music reset on the violin, accordion, bass, drums and kora.
“I just consider myself a violinist,” Carter said in an interview from her home in Maywood, N.J. “There are so many genres of music I love,” and have loved since her youth.
She grew up in Detroit, where the automotive industry attracted people from far and wide, and was “exposed to ‘world music’ at a very young age.”
“It’s all music,” she said.
As a grade-school girl, she started out playing European classical music. When she reached her teens, a friend introduced her to three violin players: Stephane Grappelli, Jean-Luc Ponty and Noel Pointer.
Then she got to see Grappelli live.
“That energy: That’s what I want,” Carter remembers thinking.
“I loved hearing my instrument do something completely different . . . to improvise, to have your own voice” brought her into a new kind of music.
That package of energy she saw in Grappelli, “that whole experience,” she said, “is jazz.”
