A Night at Panama 66
San Diego is home to no end of wonderful spots where great things happen and pass seemingly unnoticed by a general public only yards away. This can go on for years. I confess this included me where the engaging Panama 66 jazz cafe in Balboa Park is concerned.
Panama 66 is adjacent to the SD Museum of Art (SDMA) and sequesters among pillars and bronze gates that separate the Museum’s library from the adjunct building. It’s a cafe operation of long standing with a long bar, a steel sculpture by Louise Nevels
on (Night Presence II, 1976) and another dazzling perspective of the park’s famed tower. The Museum library is visible through windows on one side; a wall on the other side opens with a door into a performance hall; in that performance hall jazz reigns supreme, regularly. This is the work of Gilbert Castellanos, leader and mentor of the Young Lions Jazz Conservatory, a non-profit organization that focuses on the educational components of music: jazz theory, history, cultural context, latin/afro/brazilian rhythms, and master classes with internationally recognized musicians. Its work is to mentor the next generation of jazz greats and keep a uniquely American art form going.
ESPRESSO caught up with Gilbert Castellanos’s presentation of The Young Lions earlier this month on a Wednesday night at Panama 66’s performance hall. The Young Lions opened their show with a sudden, brilliant explosion of music performed by the Alexander Myers Quartet, leading off with Max Beitel on trumpet in a powerful session of straight ahead jazz backed up by band leader Alexander Myers on drums, Eric Wesling on Guitar and Dahlia Robinson on Bass. These guys are young–membership in the Young Lions ends at 18–but have the talent of generations in their bones. They’re the kind who can pull music from their pockets if they wanted to as easily as others might pull their keys from theirs; it pours out of them as though they’re merely exhaling and the tight quality of their sound is just beyond belief. For Myers, that night was his last leading the quartet; he’s soon off to Northwestern University with a double major in Jazz Percussion and Cognitive Sciences leading the way to a premed future.
It was a dazzling last run for him. And from the others, too.
Beginning in 2013, the Young Lions Conservatory under Castellanos formed students–from as young as age 11–into small combos of seven or eight to learn and rehearse weekly. Some of the conservatory students are featured every Wednesday in the Young Lions Series at Panama 66. Promising students have opportunity to attend jazz education festivals throughout the state, including Next Gen Monterey Jazz Festival. For Castellanos, it’s a way of giving back the opportunities in music that others provided for him; Dizzy Gillespie, George Benson, Wynton and Bradford Marsalis and many others inspired him early on and the magnificent sound found at Panama 66 is proof of the success of that legacy.
The space itself is remarkably comfortable and free form. People wander in, wander around, visit and mingle and look over the artists stationed in front creating drawings and portraits of the musicians in watercolor and conte crayon and charcoal. Wait staff bustles in with food and drink and the air vibrates with a clear beauty brought out by some hardly out of middle school.
Find some amazing jazz at Panama 66 all through August. The Young Lions are in residence there on August 9, 16th and 23rd beginning at 7pm. Check Panama66.com for more details.