Germantown has long played a meaningful role in Philly’s jazz scene, nurturing homegrown talent at local clubs, churches and community centers. However, over the last few decades, especially since the pandemic, the neighborhood has seen the closure of many of its iconic jazz venues.
A new event this weekend, Germantown Jazz Festival, is hoping to rectify that.
“I love jazz. Jazz is in my soul,” said Khadijah Renee G. Morgan, a vocalist and event producer for the festival. “We have three days of it, and it’s featuring some of Philadelphia’s outstanding local jazz musicians who made names for themselves, both regionally, nationally and internationally as well.”
Morgan has been producing jazz events for the past five years, and the launch of this project is her biggest yet. The festival will celebrate Philadelphia’s jazz legacy through three days of live music.
“Jazz has a lot of history in Germantown,” she said. “Doing venues there and producing events there showed me that Germantown loves music — the music of jazz.”
Morgan’s smaller jazz events in the neighborhood have been successful, so she thought the neighborhood might be hungry for something more.
“I decided to create something bigger that would trigger interest in re-establishing Germantown as a destination for jazz,” she said. “If we can come out en masse and show people that we love jazz at the festival, then maybe that would drum up some interest and some venture capital for greater things.”
Jazz bassist Mike Boone, 68, is excited to bring some energy to the neighborhood through his music at the festival. He used to perform in Germantown alongside musician Tony Williams, who passed away in 2023.
“Pre-pandemic we were at a place called La Rose right on Germantown Avenue,” Boone said. “And that was really a command center in terms of the music.”
Boone explained La Rose was patronized by an “older, more sophisticated crowd — jazz lovers since the ‘30s and ‘40s.”
“We’ve had octogenarians in there,” he said. “It was a hub, and since the pandemic, there really hasn’t been anything like that.”
The inaugural Germantown Jazz Festival will take place at three locations:
- the Germantown Friends Meeting House from 5 to 10 p.m. on Friday,
- the First Presbyterian Church in Germantown from 8 to 10 p.m. on Saturday, and
- the Nile Café from 4 to 6 p.m. on Sunday.
The lineup will be filled with musicians of different ages and backgrounds. Boone, for example, will be playing twice on Friday night. He teaches at Temple and his group is full of his students and recent graduates.
“I’m still learning myself,” he said, and the younger crowd “keeps me on my toes.”
“I’m not going to rest on my laurels, because of what I might have done when I was their age, so it keeps me pushing,” he said. “I want to be able to play with those young guys and have something for them. I want to be able to kick their ass a little bit. I know they’re going to kick mine.”
The festival is being put on in partnership with Artcinia, a local organization which promotes the performing arts. In addition to musical performances, there will also be artwork on display at a special Art Pavilion sponsored by October Gallery curator Mercer Redcross. Plus, Saturday will include a kid-friendly tent from The ArtSisters organization with live music, painting and drawing, beginning at noon in Vernon Park.
Any live-music event has a sense of the unknown going into it, but jazz can be truly improvisational. Audience members will get to see performers in real time making musical choices based on what they are feeling in the moment.
“You have a framework,” Boone said. “You may have a beginning and an ending and a structure — a certain amount of bars — so that foundational thing doesn’t change. But there’s a lot more freedom after you state the melody in jazz. And then everybody gets a chance to create or improvise their own melody based on whatever the chords are … That’s going to be different every time.”
Alfie Pollitt, an 82-year-old keyboardist and Bryn Mawr native, will be playing with his trio on Friday. He has been around since the heyday of the Philly jazz scene, and has seen it evolve and transform — learning from legends like John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Bud Powell, Bill Evans and Red Garland.
“We’ve been on board playing since the 1950s,” Pollitt said. “We were blessed to be around a lot of the musical greats — world-class greats who were no longer with us — and even got to meet and play with some of them.”
His trio consists of himself, Richard Hill Jr. and Alan Nelson — and he is looking forward to seeing where inspiration will take them.
“We’ve had not that many rehearsals,” Pollitt said. “We follow the tradition of some of the people that came before us … A lot of what we do is bounce off of each other, so to speak.”
“The drummer, you know, he bounces his drum sticks on his drums,” he joked. “So that’s a little different.”
Tickets for the festival are currently on sale. Prices range from $25 to $50. Tickets at the door will cost an extra $5. Morgan is hoping that the community will come out and support the event so that it can continue for years to come.
“Sadly, we didn’t raise the budget that we thought we would get,” she said. “So we’re working from a shoestring budget. We still need support.”
The event in part is being crowdfunded and anyone is welcome to head to the Germantown Jazz festival website and donate. But while seeking support for the festival, Morgan is excited to see the impact that the event will have on the community.
“There’s a lot of anxiety, a lot of hopelessness, a lot of fear… We’re definitely hurting as a community,” she said. “We can come together for music, the celebration of culture, the celebration of the legacy of who we are. I think it’s going to be very healing for the city, as well as the area of Germantown.”
