Sunday night I needed to stay away from the music stages for awhile after the Ornette Coleman performance, to let that vibration running through my body simmer down of its own accord. When finally I was ready to face the music again (sorry), I realized to my delight that tenor saxophonist Houston Person was going to be playing with the Atsuko Hashimoto Trio. Hashimoto is a Japanese woman who was “discovered” in Japan by drummer Jeff Hamilton around seven years ago, as Hamilton, the drummer in this trio, explained from the Night Club stage just after the first number of the set. After many years of jamming and performing whenever Hamilton was in Japan, they finally decided to record and tour the U.S. They had the happy thought of adding Person to the mix, and the results are marvelous.

Person has been one of my favorite sax players for years. He’s an old-time blues/soul saxman, raised in Carolina with an amber gospel sound, smiling and warm as is the man himself. In conversation, Person has emphasized to me his constant awareness of the importance of melody and even lyric, along with the fact that he still prefers playing venues that have dance floors. In fact, he once released a CD of standards that included a lyric sheet for the songs despite the fact that the recording had no singer. Houston Person was doing all the singing with his horn, on that CD and now on the Monterrey Night Club stage. Person is the sort of hornman who can climb the ladder into rapturous screaming, but who can also paint pictures with slight two note phrases, bent just right and punctuated with silence. He trades easy and ready affection with his audience, and with Hamilton and Hashimoto. They offer up happy numbers like the 60’s pop tune, “Sunny” and “Blue Moon,” plus a moving rendition of Benny Carter’s “Only Trust Your Heart.”

Hashimoto, for her part, beams back. She’s a lively and jovial organist, constantly beaming and bobbing at the keyboard. She plays with speed and finesse aplenty, but without the muscular pyrotechnics of many another organist. While she can’t match Person’s presence onstage, together the trio forms a tight, cheery ensemble. Really, this is precisely the sort of re-entry I needed after the intensity of the Ornette Coleman performance. And although the more prominent B3 master Joey DeFrancesco is coming on next, I’ve had all the organ I need for tonight, and head out into the night.

On the Arena Stage, Dave Brubeck has started his performance. Few living musicians mean more to the history of this festival than the venerable pianist. In fact, he was intimately involved with the festival’s birth, helping to convince Monterey’s municipal leaders to let the festival go on back in 1957. At any rate, even in his 80’s, Brubeck is still a gentle master at the keyboards. His ensemble includes Bobby Militello (sax and flute), Michael Moore (bass) and Randy Jones (drums). And when guitar great Jim Hall makes his entrace as guest star several number into the set, there is somewhere around 300 years of jazz experience up on that stage.

When Brubeck floats into “Dinah,” the delight on the faces of these grand jazz veterans in playing together on this grand stage is evident. Brubeck is still playing with a masterful touch, and he next moves into a haunting, ethereal number that has this packed open air arean rapt and silent. There’s just a bit of a chill, and the three-quarters moon pours a light down on the house that seems to glow the brighter at Brubeck’s bidding. Then Brubeck is on to a terse, surging blues that settles back into a classical colored reverie before finally fading out. As if to release the tension he’s created in the arena, Brubeck and band next offer up a slow, walking “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” But nothing there masters play stays static for long. Tempos, moods, even melodies shift within performances. Old masters, of course, but staid? Not on your life.

I next pop back into the Coffee Gallery venue to hear a young, but wholly established piano star, Jacky Terrasson. It seems strange to move so quickly from the packed, giant Arena into this cozy space, populated by perhaps 40 folks, shifting at the same time between one pianist and another, but that’s Monterey, folks. I’ve never seen Terrasson live, but I’ve been a fan of his CDs, both as a leader and as a co-leader with vibraphonist Stefon Harris.

Instantly I am captured by Terrasson’s emphatic, percussive style. He begins with an intriguing deconstruction of “Take the A Train” that only occassionally stops at the station to acknowledge the melody as Terrasson, sitting slightly hunched, sways over the piano. For his next number, Terrasson’s left hand etches out a clacking, recurring cadence with a Caribbean or perhaps African rhythm, with his right hand singing with shining harmonies twined through short melodic ideas. Next a hard-scrabble gospel number including a sly reference to “Eleanor Rigby” morphs into a herky-jerky rhythm with Terrasson’s left hand now pounding a recurrent, heartbeat note as his right moves from dissonance to blues, with, again, shifting harmonies flowing throughout. When Terrasson plays a soft beautiful lullabye, I’m tempted to pack up my tent and let that quiet moment wrap up the festival for me, so sweetly and satifyingly has Terrasson captured everyone in the room.

But I just can’t walk out of the Fairgrounds while Sonny Rollins is playing.

When I walk into the Arena for one last time, Sonny Rollins is already tearing open the night sky with his searing, white-hot tenor. He drives through long, questing melody lines, empassioned and bold. In each of those notes, you hear all of the notes that have come before, for years, forever. The second song I hear grooves airily with echoes of Africa pulsing throughout. And when Rollins brings the energy, or at least the tempo, down for a gorgeous rendition of “In a Sentimental Mood,” I feel, as I stand leaning against the Arena’s side wall, finally, and fully sated. Rollins plays Ellington. Nothing, at that moment, could feel more right.

At that, I bring my festival to a close. And though it seems, perhaps, almost blasphemous to walk out of the Arena while Sonny Rollins is still playing, somehow it feels better to be strolling off into the night with Rollins to serenade me as I go.

There is everyone else, and then there is Ornette Coleman. The lifetime of innovation, often years ahead of acceptance/understanding by audiences and even musicians—it's all well-known material to everyone reading this. By now, of course, the outsider has rightfully become the revered elder statesman, at least by those whose musical tastes run even minimally outside the tried and true mainstream. Beautiful, surprising compositions, many of which stand up as revelatory forty years on, and, most famously, the new directions blazed in soloing, outside the parameters of standard chord changes.

Again, all this old news. For me, the bottom line, especially live, is Coleman's singular, astounding tone, piercing, uncompromising incantations that shoot right through to into me, that live is capable of prying open my heart. Coleman is playing on Sunday afternoon on the Arena Stage and it's ironic that while the Gerald Wilson Orchestra had seemed dwarfed by the venue last night, today Coleman conquers the space entirely from his first note.

Maybe it's the soundman, but I really think, again, that it's that incredible saxophone tone and the spiritual nature of every note Coleman plays. It's a challenge to try to explain that coherently, but with each plaintive cry, you feel you're hearing every night of work and struggle that Coleman blew through before gaining acceptance, layed with what comes across in interviews as the almost total level of inner peace he's reached about it all.

Coleman has been touring in recent time with a quartet featuring two bassists and a drummer (often his son Denardo). Now he's added a third bassist and the lineup is standup bassists Tony Falanga and Charnett Moffett plus electric bassist Al McDowell, with Denardo Coleman on drums. Two standup bassists, one predominantly bowing and one plucking, plus an electric bass. The three bassists sometimes set up a wall of sound for Coleman to wail over, but sometime McDowell switches almost into guitarist mode, trading melody lines back and forth with the saxophonist.

As always, Ornette Coleman's playing is careening, blasting, devoutly roaming, fearless music. As always, Coleman's playing shoots into me and sets up a sympathetic harmonic (or harmalodic) vibration, an effect I get from no other musician. Coleman's playing is calming and explosive all at once. The most enlightening concert I have ever attended was Coleman's show several years back with the 2-bass quartet at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco. This performance doesn't quite match that, but it comes close. Thank you, Ornette.

I finally make it over to the big Arena stage for one of the signature events of the weekend, famed bandleader Gerald Wilson's commissioned big band composition, "Monterey Moods." Wilson also did the commissioned piece for the festival's 20th anniversary (and it's 40th as well), so tonight's music is part of an ongoing Monterey Festival tradition.

The first few numbers feature guest star Kenny Burrell on guitar. Their version of "Stormy Monday" is especially cheerful. But then Burrell leaves and Wilson launches into the night's major work..

Sadly, for me, the music does not quite deliver, despite the fact that I am indeed looking forward to some hearty big band fun.

The composition is fine, the playing spirited by a mostly veteran group of musicians. But, perhaps because the music and performance are swallowed up by the enormity of the arena, the composition never really moves off dead center, never takes off as more than a standard big band arrangement. And then I get cold. That's not the music's fault, but it was the last straw for me, and I head off for something indoors and warm.

What I find is Burrell again, playing with a quartet back in the Night Club setting. Burrell is one of the original heroes of jazz guitar, with an easy style that features a precise bluesy touch. In fact, he's got a mellow blues going as I sneak in, and this clearly will be a perfect decompression at the end of a long night of music. Smiling as he briefly comments, "Tis the season," Burrell runs the first few notes of "Autumn Leaves." It's fluid, signature Burrell. And after the first few notes, the quartet (Mike Melvion, piano; Roberto Miranda, bass; Clayton Cameron, drums), kick the tune into a gentle samba beat. Burrell's fingers flash across the frets, kicking up notes like leaves swirling around on a bracing fall breeze.