True Blue Jazz brings it for ninth festival year
The True Blue Jazz 9th anniversary year will come to life from Wednesday to Sunday, Oct. 13 to 17, across the heart of downtown Rehoboth Beach in eight local restaurant/bars along with the Boardwalk Plaza Hotel as the principal headliner showroom. For the first time, taking a giant leap for real jazz, four newly anointed True Blue Jazz sponsor venues are announced all around Lewes – Lefty’s Alley & Eats, Nassau Valley Vineyards, Bramble & Brine at the Buttery, and Bethany Blues.
“Downtown Rehoboth Beach has been and continues to be the epicenter of our drive to bring the meaning of community back to jazz week in Rehoboth Beach. After eight years with that as a focus of True Blue Jazz, and the evolution of business and life beyond Rehoboth-Midway, we had great interest in enveloping the Lewes community into our True Blue Jazz Festival,” said Eddie Sherman, festival co-founder and producer.
“Over this past year, True Blue Jazz really broadened our reach and service to the jazz community. Celebrating International Jazz Day as representing participants for the fifth year with two days of live and streaming concert events was one facet of our work to make jazz available to Cape Region audiences. The free youth jazz events like the Boysie Lowery Living Jazz Residency Concert and the Delaware High School Jazz Fest, both held at Nassau Valley Winery, are other ways we have been putting real jazz at the forefront of life for folks here in coastal Delaware,” said Peggy Raley, festival artistic director/co-founder and producer.
Added to that is the success of the ongoing monthly jazz series First Wednesdays at the Pine in downtown Rehoboth Beach. The events have proven to be very popular, with their own elite list of business community sponsors like Pat Coluzzi of Sotheby’s, Ashton Pools, and the Lee Ann Wilkinson Group of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Gallo Realty.
It is that kind of year-round activity and effort that brought recognition to True Blue Jazz Festival this past April at the Clifford Brown International Jazz Day Awards Program. There, festival producers Eddie Sherman and Peggy Raley received an award honoring them and True Blue Jazz as the 2021 Top Jazz Presenters of the Year.
TBJ has a string of stellar jazz acts set to perform Oct. 13-17, ranging from international performer and recording star alto sax legend Bobby Watson to virtuoso entertainer, trumpet star and vocalist Benny Benack III joined by special guest vocalist and song stylist Cyrille Aimée. They can be seen for two shows nightly at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday, Oct. 15 and 16, at the Boardwalk Plaza Hotel. To purchase tickets for those two headliner show nights, and for the six-hour big band jazz marathon from 12 to 6 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 17, at Rehoboth Beach Volunteer Fire Company Station 1, go to truebluejazz.org. True Blue Jazz donates all proceeds from the firehouse big band marathon to Rehoboth Beach Volunteer Fire Company.
