7th Annual Gotham Jazz Festival
May 18
Three West Club
3 W. 51st St., Manhattan

About six years ago, I witnessed a rather intriguing musical and social phenomenon over the course of two gigs by an outstanding trumpeter-singer-bandleader, Bria Skonberg. First, Ms. Skonberg and her band performed at Symphony Space, and then, two days later, they played the Gotham Jazz Festival.  

The first was a sit-down audience, and most of the crowd was of a certain age; in fact, I was one of the younger people in the house. At the festival, there were seats and a few mature listeners, but the crowd was made up mostly of young people who came to dance, and I had suddenly become one of the old-timers. It was the same band, the same musicians, the exact same tunes in the same order and with the same soloists, and yet the audience was completely different, as was the energy. 

That focus on dancing is a key element of the Gotham Jazz Fest, the seventh annual edition of which takes place this Sunday at the Three West Club. The festival’s key point man, producer, and founder, Patrick Soluri of Prohibition Productions, wears multiple hats. Not only is he the central presenter and organizer and, more recently, a drummer and bandleader who runs the Hot Toddies Jazz Band, he is an accomplished swing dancer, and he always makes sure to accommodate dancers at every event he produces. 

Thus, swing dancers, most of whom are under age 40, have always flocked to Prohibition Projects events, during which the audience then becomes almost as important a part of the show as the musicians and singers.

The name Gotham Jazz Festival is accurate but fairly generic: The event does indeed take place in Manhattan and the music performed is jazz, but the title could be much more specific, considering almost 20 different ensembles are playing in multiple spaces over a 12-hour period. Nearly all of the leaders and sidemen can be safely described as young, and most of them specialize in one of the many varieties of pre-modern jazz. 

The Hot Toddies, who have a new album titled “Triple Step” and a regular Wednesday gig at Somewhere-Nowhere, are aligned to the traditional jazz/New Orleans model. Likewise, pianist Conal Fowlkes, who appears here in a duo with saxophone virtuoso Jay Rattman, is also the co-director of the New Orleans High Society Band that plays Birdland on Thursdays.

The Hot Sardines established themselves a decade ago as one of the flagship ensembles of the current hot jazz renaissance; more recently, they have also branched out into two satellite groups led by its co-leaders: Evan Palazzo & Friends and Elizabeth Bougerol and Her Band. All three groups will play on Sunday.

Saxophonist Eyal Vilner and trumpeter Danny Jonokuchi both lead full-size big bands in the tradition of the swing era, though they both play mostly original music rather than recreations, which is still essentially in the style of the 1930s and ’40s and highly danceable.  Adrien Chevalier is an outstanding French violinist who works in the jazz manouche style associated with Stephane Grappeli and Django Reinhardt. The Anderson Brothers, twin multi-reed masters, offer a kind of mid-century swing that ranges from traditional jazz to early modernism.

Other bands take the music in different directions: Saxophonist-guitarist-vocalist Danny Lipsitz and the Brass Tacks focus on rhythm-and-blues and early rock, and he too honors the general mandate in that the group primarily plays for dancing.  Drummer Daniel Glass, whom most of us first heard with one of the better 1990s retro swing bands, the Royal Crown Revue, currently leads his own trio, with guitarist Sean Harkness and drummer Michael O’Brien, that uses the jazz-fusion movement of the 1970s as its point of departure.

Other, more uncategorizable groups include the Arntzen Brothers from Canada, jazz age crooner and multi-string player Bryce Edwards, and the high-powered young trumpeter Alphonso Horne and his Gotham Kings.

One group not to be missed is, naturally, is Ms. Skonberg’s, especially in that she’s featuring two players whom we don’t get to hear nearly enough in New York, the reed chameleon Patrick Bartley and the veteran trumpeter Warren Vache. And to illustrate the festival’s emphasis on dancing, of both the social and the theatrical kind, two excellent tap dancers will be featured, AC Lincoln, who leads his own quintet, and Dewitt Fleming, who made a solid hit earlier this month in the City Center Encores! Production of “Wonderful Town.”

The emphasis on dancing is a good explanation as to why the Gotham Festival has been popular enough to keep going for seven editions now. Mr. Soluri generally provides dance instruction at all of his events, and his own CDs include the metronome beats-per-minute count for the benefit of deejays spinning for dancers. 

For whatever reason, the Gotham Jazz Festival, like its predecessor the New York Hot Jazz Festival, has succeeded in doing what more formal presenting organizations have long been trying to achieve, which is to attract young people, not only as players but more importantly as audience members who will hopefully cultivate a lifelong taste for jazz, as both dancers and listeners. Now if I could only essay a simple foxtrot without tripping over my own feet. …