St. Louis will be a bit steamy this weekend with temperatures hovering around 90°. Here’s an idea to beat the heat: cool jazz. The Brothers Lazaroff are kicking off their first Laz Jazz Fest on Saturday, July 15, at the Grandel Theater and the Dark Room in the Grand Center Arts District, and tickets are still available.
David and Jeff Lazaroff, the Jewish St. Louis brothers and leaders of the Brothers Lazaroff band, host the popular Hanukkah Hullaballoo each December. The Laz Jazz Fest, like the hullaballoo, will support a worthy cause. Proceeds will benefit the St. Louis Art Place Initiative, which helps build wealth and equity for low to moderate-income artists through homeownership.
Laz Jazz Fest is not exactly Hanukkah in July, though. It will feature the Lazaroffs, their band and a number of special guests performing jazz. That will include a full horn section.
“We’re not straight up jazz players,” said Jeff Lazaroff. “With Laz jazz, we were leaning much more heavily into jazz idioms like swing or bop or Afro-Cuban or other different rhythms. We were taking our original folkier tunes and jazzifying them.”
The Lazaroffs are fans of the granddaddy of jazz festivals, the New Orleans Jazzfest, so they’ve borrowed a few NOLA tricks, like tasty food offerings and “cubes,” or schedules with specific times when each set will begin. Those artists represent a wide range of jazz and jazz-inspired music, Lazaroff said.
“We’re excited to bring these artists together,” he said. “We feel great about getting to work with artists we’ve always wanted to like (rapper) Blvck Spvde and Anita Jackson who we’ve worked with and Dave Gomez, who’s fantastic and we played with at Joe’s Café. We also have Mo Egeston who used to be a member of the Brothers Lazaroff. And we’re excited to work with Kaleb Kirby, Bob DeBoo, and Adam Maness—they call themselves KBA.”
Other artists scheduled to appear include Rabbi James Stone Goodman, Joey Ferber, DJ Nune, DJ Boogieman, DJ Black Sun, Elizabeth McQueen and Thelonius Kryptonite.
Laz Jazz Fest will consist of three stages, two of them indoors with air conditioning, to add another layer of cool.
Tickets for Laz Jazz Fest are available from MetroTix here.
