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The 55th annual Monterey Jazz Festival is receding into memory now, but this was one of those years that will be fondly recalled. The programming was diverse and of consistently high quality, the weather was excellent if a bit chilly, and the proceedings came off with barely a hitch.

But the most striking aspect was this year’s abundance of younger talent. The jazz mainstream spends a lot of time lionizing the past and fretting about the future, but this year’s festival felt like a passing of the torch — or perhaps more accurately, an embracing of today’s young artists as the continuation of the jazz tradition. Ambrose Akinmusire (age 30) was this year’s artist-in-residence and has a place in the Festival’s touring ensemble. Christian Scott (29), Gerald Clayton (28), Mads Tolling (32), José James (34) and Tigran Hamasyan (25) packed them in across the grounds, while Esperanza Spalding starred on the big Jimmy Lyons arena stage at 27. The student ensembles featured on Sunday afternoon were particularly sharp this year, and nobody will be surprised if a few of those players wind up back at Monterey leading their own groups in a few years.

Here are the memories I’ll take with me:

Favorite Performances:

1. 90 Miles
2. Antonio Sanchez & Migration
3. Jack DeJohnette Group
4. Ambrose Akinmusire
5. Christian Scott

Best Discovery:

This one’s easy: Mingo Fishtrap won a lot of new fans on the Garden Stage on Saturday and reminded us all why Austin, Texas has such a great musical reputation.

Greatest Regret:

Missing sets by vocalist Gregory Porter on Friday and the Jack DeJohnette/Bill Frisell duo on Sunday. I also wish I’d caught more of Catherine Russell and the MJF on Tour band.

Quotable:

“Great. Now my own band is heckling me.”
– Aram Shelton, after dodging explanation of the song title “Joints and Tendons”

“I’m really glad they’re on our team.”
– Linda Tillery, reacting to a flyover of six fighter jets from the USAF Thunderbirds

The 55th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival has saved the best for last.

Closing out Sunday night’s program on the stage known as Dizzy’s Den, Nicholas Payton, David Sánchez and their 90 Miles band are tearing the roof off the place with a long, thrilling set. The name refers to the distance from Florida to Cuba, and the bridge they forge across that gap is strong, broad, and burning with intensity.

Normally, this group has three leaders — vibraphonist Stefon Harris has had to cancel to attend the birth of his son. But even missing one of its core members, this is a sextet with serious juice.

Standing alone at the side of the stage, percussionist Mauricio Herrera gets it going with a spirited invocation on batá drums, gradually sliding into “And this Too Shall Pass.” The horns enter with a sense of calm spirituality, floating on gently crashing waves from drummer Henry Cole and bassist Ricky Rodriguez, then launch into a tough midtempo glide.

The leaders establish the tone early. David Sánchez brings a blend of late-night urbanity and gruff, swaggering yowls on tenor saxophone, and Nicholas Payton lays down on the law on trumpet: wailing and slicing, growling and leaping in white-hot, jabbing breaks. “Brown Belle Blues” illustrates the contrast perfectly: both horns need to flex some heavy muscle to get through the dense rhythmic thickets, but while Sánchez body-slams and elbows his way through, Payton drills a hole straight through the center.

For all the pyrotechnics coming out of the horns, the real punch of the band comes from a rhythm section that just won’t quit. Herrera’s conga solos barrel down the line like a runaway train, merging with the rapid pulses from Cole and Rodriguez as pianist Zaccai Curtis rolls and bops with quicksilver fluidity.

But don’t think this band is one-dimensional. Check out Rodriguez’s solo bass intro to “City Sunrise”: his clear tone and highly melodic, meditative lines are gorgeous. And Payton’s slinky tune “The Backward Step” is a real highlight, full of a yearning beauty which is reflected by all the members of the band.

They keep it all going for nearly two hours, climbing to ever-higher peaks. By the time they’re finally finished and the Monterey Jazz Festival reluctantly draws to a close, it’s nearly midnight. But the capacity crowd is alive and buzzing. This is a set they’re all going to remember for a long time.

Tigran Hamasyan — photo by Vahan Stepanyan

Sunday, 8:30 PM – Coffee House Gallery

The Coffee House Gallery is the smallest and most obscure of the five main stages at the Monterey Jazz Festival. It’s tucked into an easily-missed little building just off the midway, in between the Arena and the Garden Stage. Even the entrance is hard to find: you don’t enter through the front door; that leads to a women’s restroom. Instead the audience must follow a ramp leading off the far side and pass through an odd vestibule. Once they find their way in, however, visitors to the Coffee House Gallery can usually hear some of the Festival’s most surprising and innovative sounds on this tiny pressure cooker of a stage.

It’s a perfect setting for Tigran Hamasyan, a 25-year-old pianist from Armenia whose four albums — all released on French labels — have slipped largely under the radar in this country. At Monterey he is presenting a brand-new trio: it’s their very first gig as a working unit, and for his first of two sets Hamasyan has chosen to rearrange several pieces that were originally piano solos.

Hamasyan’s music is well outside the mainstream, but the pieces in this set follow a particular pattern. They begin quietly, with long, atmospheric solo introductions. As Hamasyan plays low staccato chords and distant, drifting melodies that recall Armenian folk tunes, he adds looping accents from a sampler stashed inside his piano and accompanies himself with soft whistling or wordless vocals.

And then the trio explodes.

The slamming grooves come seemingly from nowhere. Huge, pounding, roughly circular patterns sweep off the stage in shockwaves as Hamasyan, bassist Sam Minaie and drummer Gavin Salmon pour their entire bodies into it. All three musicians are in constant motion, rocking back and forth in unison. Hamasyan can’t stay seated: he jumps up to add extra weight to a phrase, then drops back down for a furious, knotted scramble across the keys. Salmon reaches back and then hurls himself forward into his drums. Minaie, swept along, strengthens the foundation with deep bass fills…

And just as suddenly, it’s all gone. Hamasyan is back where he began, alone on the lonesome expanses.

It’s electrifying, but after two or three of these cycles, it starts to feel a bit repetitive. On the other hand, this new group already shows they have the cohesion and chops to branch out. It will be interesting to see where they go next.

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John Abercrombie — photo by Chris Tribble

Sunday, 7:00 PM – Night Club Stage

Kicking off a triple-bill of Hammond B3 organ sets at the Night Club stage, guitarist John Abercrombie is offering up a cool, modernized version of a classic sound. The organ trio is a combo that might be more closely associated with greasy blues and soul-jazz than Abercrombie’s calm, fusion-derived approach, but he’s no stranger to the format: some of Abercrombie’s earliest gigs in the 1960s were with B3 master Johnny “Hammond” Smith, and he’s revisited the organ-guitar intersection several times since.

As the set begins, it looks like Abercrombie might be washed out by organist Gary Versace, who swamps the leader’s hushed intro to “Gone with the Wind” in a wave of droning chords. But the trio soon settles into a brisk, snappy groove. Abercrombie’s solo lines curve nicely around Versace’s hard stroll while Adam Nussbaum, a longtime veteran of Abercrombie’s organ projects, pushes them both from his drum kit.

The trio sounds better in “Nice Idea,” a relaxed waltz with a chilled tone. The organ tiptoes and supports the ensemble vibe even in Versace’s solo, and Abercrombie waxes eloquent with an increasingly complex turn of his own, analyzing the melody, poking and prodding it. His eyes are shut tight, lips moving as he quietly vocalizes along with the guitar. And then, as Nussbaum ramps up the intensity, Abercrombie begins surfing over the beat, speeding the tempo as he builds to an exhilarating finish. Drifting, billowing, then thickening into a rich stew: that’s the formula for this group, and the full house at the Night Club is getting a real treat.

With Larry Goldings and the great Chester Thompson still to come, much of the audience is likely to be camped out here for the rest of the evening. The “organ blowout” has become an annual tradition on this stage, and the Monterey Jazz Festival deserves thanks for keeping the B3 flame burning. But the real kudos have to go to DJ and impresario Pete Fallico, tireless champion of the jazz organ and the driving force behind the night’s program. Here’s hoping for yet another spin next year.

Sunday, 4:00 PM – Garden Stage

The circle of jazz violinists is a relatively small one. The list of top jazz musicians from Denmark is equally brief. But Mads Tolling is that rare bird who belongs to both groups, and his set at the Monterey Jazz Festival is a salute both to the masters of his instrument and to the heritage of his homeland.

This is a versatile group. The set opens with “Danish Dessert,” a lilting, lyrical breeze that seems to dance around the Garden Stage. But a few minutes later Tolling is channeling Jean-Luc Ponty with a rocking, thoroughly electrified version of “Lila’s Dance.” Running his violin through electronic effects, Tolling churns through massive chords and quicksilver solo lines, setting up a hot, nasty blues-guitar grind from Michael Abraham over Eric Garland’s forceful drumming and the quick-jabbing bass of George Ban-Weiss.

Tolling continues to switch things up as the set progresses. A tribute to the late Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen spins in a gentle spiral, serene and dreamlike. But then the quartet gets down to some old-fashioned, good-time swing with Svend Asmussen’s high-flying classic “Takeoff Blues.” Here, Tolling starts his solo off with a humorous, downshifting sound almost like a passing police siren, then struts and saws with a quirky mix of rock energy and classical finesse.

He gets around stylistically, but at the center of Tolling’s style is a direct, charming folksiness. He plays lyrically and sweetly, but there’s no syrup here. And he plays with fire, but there’s no bombast. It’s a sound from the heart: friendly, inviting, and full of good spirit.

They’re getting right down to the roots at the Garden Stage as the 55th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival swings through its final day. Five figures, four of them women, all of them smiling, are seated in an arc across the stage. They hold African drums and shakers, but it’s the power of their combined voices that really shines.

Spirituals, line chants, Pentecostal shouts, civil rights anthems, plantation songs, James Brown funk. Linda Tillery and her Cultural Heritage Choir bring all these and more. The quintet trades off lead vocals with each song, but everybody pitches in through percussion, handclaps, vocal bass lines, scatting, dance, or even straight-up yells of encouragement. It’s thrilling and infectious, and a sage reminder of where all that jazz really came from.

The mood varies, from the hypnotic chant of “See Line Woman” through a jumping “Little Rosie,” from tragedy to comedy, from urban grit to backwoods dirt. But it all goes deep. These are songs of joy, of faith, of pain and toil, of political mobilization. It’s a celebration of life itself.

Tillery encourages audience participation: “Even if you can’t sing well,” she urges them, “Just sing badly and loudly. It feels good to let that out.” She’s right; it does. And it feels oh so good to listen to this group on a lazy Sunday.

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Gerald Clayton — photo by Ben Wolf

It’s getting late, and pianist Gerald Clayton is in his third and final set of the evening. But the Coffee House Gallery is packed, and the audience is giving Clayton’s trio their undivided attention.

They make a striking impression, this young group. They’re fashionably dressed: Clayton wears a vest and drummer Marcus Gilmore sports a bow tie. Clayton and bassist Joe Sanders are both dreadlocked: Clayton’s sticking out from the back of his head in an unruly tangle, Sanders’s falling forward to hide his face as he leans in for a solo. But it’s their music that stands out the most.

Clayton has been making waves for a few years now. His romantic, lyrical touch is a constant, with many of his tunes displaying a contemplative, vaguely sexy ebb and flow. But the presence of Gilmore on drums is perhaps injecting a new element here, a healthy tension I have not heard from Clayton’s group before. The set is comprised mostly of newly written material, some of it being publicly performed for the first time, and Clayton’s pianism seems to have acquired a new sharpness, a more declarative tone.

Indeed, as the set progresses, it becomes apparent that this trio is not so much about pulling in the same direction as it is about mutual orbits. A slippery version of “All the Things You Are” moves from a fat, vibrantly-toned bass introduction to find Clayton dancing around the melody. Gilmore pushes the piece forward, but piano and bass are finding their own arcs around that axis.

The band wraps up at around midnight, but nobody wants to leave. Saturday can’t be over already, can it? It feels like the Monterey Jazz Festival is just getting warmed up.