STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

There’ll be jazz riffs reverberating through Sun Valley this coming week as there has been for 35 years.

But this year’s event is being billed as Sun Valley Jazz Party, rather than the Sun Valley Jazz and Music Festival, as it has been in the past.

Many of the popular bands will be back for the event which runs from Thursday to Sunday, Oct. 17-20, including Blues Street Band, Tom Rigney and his Cajun-flavored music and Boise’s High Street Band, which plays hits from the 1960s and ‘70s. But it will all take place in one venue—the Limelight Ballroom in the Sun Valley Inn—rather than at multiple venues throughout Sun Valley.

Professor Cunningham and His Old School Jazz Band is fronted by vocalist and reedman Adrian Cunningham, an Australian native now living in New York City.

“It’s really going to be a combination between a festival and a jazz party,” said Co-Director Carol Loehr. “Jazz parties typically feature between 15 and 20 individual artists who get mixed and matched. We will have six full bands plus quite a few individual artists.”

There has been no scrimping on the quality of the musicians in the pared-down party, Loehr added: “The quality of the music we’re bringing is fabulous. We feel honored to work with the world-class musicians that we’ve always brought and that we’re still bringing.”

In fact, the Jazz Party will sport a lot of fan favorites, including the Marching Band Salute, the Clarinet Clambake, New Orleans Rhythm and Blues, the Ladies Sing and a gospel set. Tom Rigney will perform his  Party on the Bayou.

Shaymus Hanlin will sing a Frank Sinatra set. The Gib Hochstrasser’s Kings of Swing will come from Boise to perform the big band sound of the Glenn Miller Orchestra. There will be dance lessons teaching such moves as the East Coast Swing. Banjomaniacs will be back, and Professor Cunningham & His Old School will introduce Intoxicating Drinking Songs.

The Boise-based High Street Band is known as a party band bent on getting people up and dancing to the hits of the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and beyond.

There also will be sets focused on the songs of such legends as Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, Count Basie and Bobby Darin.

Additionally, Sherry Colby and The Guys will perform a free Atkinsons’ Jazz in the Square at 4 p.m. Friday, Oct. 18, in Ketchum Town Square. And Tom Hook and the Hounds will follow that up with another free concert for the community at 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19, in Ketchum Town Square.

New this year: Brunch and dinner buffets in the Continental Room next to the Limelight Ballroom to make it easier for attendees to find quick-to-grab sustenance.

The menus range from a Taste of Tuscany Dinner buffet featuring three-cheese ravioli, grilled flank steak with basil pesto, ratatouille couscous and Italian sweets the first night, followed by a carving station with roast sirloin of beef and cider-sage roasted turkey breast another night.

Shaymus Hanlin sings songs from popular crooners like Frank Sinatra.

Tickets for the four-day Jazz Party went on sale April 1, 2024, and sold out April 2. But Loehr says there may be additional tickets available, along with any tickets turned in from those who cannot use theirs, the morning of Thursday, Oct. 17, at the Jazz Office at Sun Valley Inn.

“People are coming from all over the place,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ll have all 50 states but they are coming from all over.”

Loehr and her husband Jeff Loehr made the difficult decision to pare the size of the Sun Valley Jazz and Music Festival for two reasons: Declining attendance and the rising costs of putting on the festival.

Attendance was robust up until COVID, drawing as many as 7,000 attendees a year. But a two-year hiatus during the pandemic was devastating.

There’s always room on the dance floor.

“We were recovering from COVID well enough, but then after last year’s festival was over, my husband Jeff had a quadruple bypass and valve replacement. We had to do some serious soul searching,” Carol Loehr said. “We were the kids when we took over the festival from my parents 20 years ago, and we’re not the kids anymore. We both turned 70 this last year and we’ve been doing the jazz festival half our lives, beginning with helping my parents who ran it the first 15 years.

“We’re not in danger of bankruptcy, but the festival can be stressful. It’s a good stress, but we need to cut down on that for Jeff’s sake. And the resort does not have the staff to staff the multiple venues we had in the past.”

The festival was started by Loehr’s father Tom Hazzard, a Boisean and jazz lover who identified Sun Valley as the perfect place to have a jazz festival. For years bands played at multiple venues, including Carol’s Dollar Mountain Lodge, the nexStage Theater, River Run Lodge and Warm Springs Lodge, as well as Sun Valley Resort’s Boiler Room, which was turned into Satchmo’s Lounge for one week every year.

Attendees reveled in taking breaks on the lawn of the Sun Valley Inn with golden aspen, and Floridians clamored to see a kiss of snow while here.

“When my parents started, there were 300 jazz festivals in the country. There are probably seven or eight left today. I think there’s one in Florida that are still doing multiple venues and three or four in California. But there used to be 40 festivals in the Northwest; now all the ones in Washington and Oregon are gone and ours is the only one left in the Pacific Northwest,” said Loehr.

Hazzard felt strongly about nurturing the love of jazz among young people, providing venues for a popular youth band from Oregon and jazz bands from Wood River High School and Boise. The Loehrs continued that.

“It was a great culture developed by the World War II generation. And we were feeling very encouraged and hopeful about the growing interest from young up-and-coming kids,” Loehr said.

The Loehrs are hopeful their daughter and son-in-law will continue the Jazz Party.

“My grandson has learned to run the sound board so he’s been part of our tech crew, running sound board for smaller venues. He’s looking at maybe a career move for so that may be something,” she said. “Right now, we’re taking it one year at a time.”

To learn more, visit https://www.sunvalleyjazz.com/.