Jarrell Hosley, the organizer of Sunday’s free concert in Southeast Portland’s Ventura Park, lights up when talking about headliner Esperanza Spalding, a five-time Grammy award-winning artist who has shared recording studios or stages with Prince, Stevie Wonder and the world’s best jazz performers.
“Esperanza and I were both born and raised here, and we understand East Portland,” said Hosley, supervisor of Portland Parks & Recreation’s Summer Free For All program, which debuts the East Portland Summer Arts Festival July 9-10.
The free weekend event, from 2 p.m.-8 p.m. at Ventura Park, 460 S.E. 113th Ave., also has hands-on, family-friendly art and music activities.
The theme of the first East Portland festival is music and expression, said Hosley, who hopes the event that brings the community together to celebrate arts, culture and hometown pride east of the Willamette River becomes an annual summer tradition.
The concert starts at 6 p.m. Sunday with Spalding scheduled to appear after performances by Family Fun Drum, Manifest Dance Agency PDX and Hip Hop Soulsation Academy.
The two-day festival, part of the Summer Free for All program of no-cost cultural events across Portland, is the east-side version of the longstanding Washington Park Summer Festival, which started in 1949 at the Rose Garden Amphitheater in Southwest Portland. The outdoor concert series ran in various forms for decades until funding forced it to come and go.
This year’s Washington Park Summer Festival takes place Aug. 5-7 with Espacio Flamenco, Albina Music Trust’s Jazz Reimagined and dramatic soprano Angela Brown in Verdi’s opera “Aida.”
Spalding has performed at the Portland Jazz Festival in the past. This time, however, she flew from North Carolina after a Saturday concert to take the stage Sunday in Ventura Park.
The Portland jazz prodigy and “jazz genius” plays instruments that include bass and piano as well as her voice and poetic lyrics she has written in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Her compositions are judicious fusions of classical, jazz, South American folk and world music.
She grew up in a multilingual, multiethnic household. Her mother is of Welsh, Hispanic and Native American descent and her father is African American.
Through her talent, tools and disciplines, she wants to “transmit care and beauty through vibration/sound/presence,” according to her Songwrights Apothecary Lab website.
Born in Portland in 1984, she taught herself to play the violin after watching cellist Yo-Yo Ma on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” From age five to 15, she performed with the Chamber Music Society of Oregon.
She left high school at 16, but soon earned a bachelor’s degree in music at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she was hired, at the age of 20, to teach. Since 2017, she has been a music professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Norah Jones and Spalding lead the 2022 Newport Jazz Festival lineup at Fort Adams State Park in Newport, Rhode Island July 29-31.
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The East Portland Summer Arts Festival opened Saturday with Aaron Nigel Smith, a Grammy-nominated, Portland-based musician performing with One World Chorus, the nonprofit he founded to give underserved youth access to quality arts-enrichment training.
Earlier Saturday afternoon at the Big Up Music Show area, Bob Marley and the Wailers’ “Buffalo Soldier” was playing as Nigel Smith encouraged kids to video their original skit or music to promote peace and other positive values. He’ll be at the festival on Sunday.
Also on stage Saturday was performance artist Sora Shodo, who paints while inspired by live music.
Most of the audience spread out on the grass fronting the stage, but Timothy L. McNair of Portland had a clear view of the performers from the street where he parked his modified, firemist red 1995 Cadillac Eldorado. He flew open the two Lamborghini-inspired scissor doors, and sat in one of the leather front seats.
Timothy L. McNair of Portland had a great view of the stage on July 9 from his modified, firemist red 1995 Cadillac Eldorado that has Lamborghini-inspired scissor doors.Janet Eastman/The Oregonian
Earlier Saturday afternoon, at the Community Music Center’s booth, kids picked up a violin, ukulele or drums to join a group of musicians, and the Multnomah Arts Center had long tables filled with supplies for people to create art.
There was also a table with information about Portland Street Response, a program within Portland Fire & Rescue that sends mental health workers instead of police to most low-level mental health crisis calls.
The activities, including Nigel Smith’s Family Fun Drumming, continue Sunday.
See a list of Portland parks’ events at portland.gov/parks/arts-culture/sffa.
— Janet Eastman | 503-294-4072
