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It’s been a week since the 2025 Rochester International Jazz Festival brought the city to life.
While the winds and rain of Thursday morning seemed to bring the week’s heat to a temporary lull, a little bit of a chill did nothing to set the crowds back from the sweet warmth of jazz. In fact, the weekend’s pregame proved to be one of the busiest days of the festival thus far, with Jazz Street packed to the brim with casual concertgoers, festival regulars, and musicians alike.
Day 7 brought one of the festival’s most exciting vocalists into the fray, with Veronica Swift taking the stage at beautiful Kilbourn Hall. Swift’s strengths as a performer are vast, but nothing really compares to her versatility. In this show, she displayed her bebop vocal scatting, her impeccable dynamic range, and her ability to sing a jazz pop tune just as well as an opera aria or a rock song.
Swift is a gifted performer, and everything she does captures the audience. From her bright pink dress to her engaging tone, the crowd latched onto her every move. She was just as captivating when she spoke through her setlist as when she sang. Her introductions to each song were simple, but relevant. Swift pulled off having two Queen songs in her set right next to each other with so much grace, and they were both great, especially her version of “The Show Must Go On,” which she merged with the aria “Vesti la giubba” from the opera “Pagliacci.”
Her backing band, with Alexander Burke on piano, Ben Tiberio on bass (he also supported Sasha Berliner earlier in the week), and Brian Viglione of the Dresden Dolls on drums, gave Swift support from some fantastic musicians. As soon as you start to realize the talent of the other three, you suddenly hear a trombone start playing. After a half second of wondering why you hear a trombone when there isn’t one on the stage, you realize that Swift also does a perfect trombone impression with her voice. Oh, and an electric guitar.
Swift’s vocal abilities, versatility, and storytelling abilities all contributed to a sense of musical universality that made her one of the most well-loved acts of the festival so far.
At the Wegmans Stage at Parcel 5, the Bruce Katz Band set a bright tone for the evening’s repertoire as they painted tones of vibrant music over the cool gray sky. The three-piece ensemble, featuring frontman keyboardist Katz along with a guitarist and drummer, felt like proper rock stars as they jammed under the stage’s fluorescent lights to an eager crowd. Amid the lingering smell of cinnamon and street-vendor kettle corn, the audience extended comfortably across the lawn: some up close and personal to the stage, others spread out with lawn chairs and picnic blankets, with many wandering the back of the pavilion in hopes to take in a good meal and a good show.
Katz’s keyboard chops span the conventional and the more abstract reaches of jazz. Paired with percussion and the swing of low guitar, he was practically unstoppable, melding timbres and tones across his Hammond B3 organ to shift between the music’s oscillating energy. Cycling between crisp harmonies of rock fusion and swing sentimentalities, the group truly knew no limits in their reach.
When Katz went solo, he was just as powerful, compelling in his performance, and beyond impressive in his form. Pieces and improvisations dipped into ragtime and funk, swung up and down the breadth of the keyboard, and raced with such rapid speed you’d think he was about to get a ticket.
In the evening light, the performance was a marvelous experience, regardless of whether you were in the front row or doing cartwheels at the back of the crowd, as a few young festivalgoers spent their time during the set.
However, Katz and his band weren’t the only cool cats at the function.
A few blocks away, Thundercat was taking the stage at Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre to the arms of a wide audience taking up almost the entirety of the thousand-plus seat theatre.
“Sometimes I feel like Spongebob, sometimes I feel like Patrick,” Thundercat confessed to the crowd. Along with his status as a Rolling Stone-renowned top-50 bassist and genre-melding instrumentalist, he’s also a big fan of the early 2000s under-the-sea cartoon.
Thundercat, also known as Stephen Lee Bruner, is defining a new wave in contemporary jazz, reflected in the show’s youthful audience and his sound’s electronic influence. The Thundercat bass isn’t simply a bass: it’s warped, it’s warm, and it washes the room entirely with thick full melody. Paired with a drummer and keyboardist, the cat clawed his way across his home instrument with ease, oozing harmony and rhythmic refrain along the way.
While a man with a large discography and a few largely-popularized hit tracks, Thundercat used his two-hour frontlining time to sink into the jazz of the matter: extending the melody and the moment of each track beyond what was recorded and what was well known. Lengthy solos from the trio cascaded the evening as the theatre echoed with the long-spinning hits of drums and crunchy synth chords.
Even some of his most popular tracks, Thundercat worked to elevate. After finishing a rendition of the arguably short “Overseas” (which lasts 1:28 on record), Bruner repeated the tune: this time modeling the tune after Sonic the Hedgehog—presumably through its speed.
On “A Fan’s Mail (Tron Song Suite II)”, a dripping R&B ballad sentimental to Bruner’s love for cool cats (the animal) and their cool nine-lived lifestyle, he pulled out what was likely the Jazz Fest debut of the “Meowdulator”—a bass pedal that emulates, you guessed it, the symphonic sound of a cat’s meow.
But when Thundercat and his bass meowed, he wasn’t alone. Along with cheers of approval throughout the evening, Bruner’s playfulness was met with chants of “meow” from the audience.
Along with sticking to the setlist, he took the time to complete his Spongebob allegory (“In this moment I feel like Squidward”) and touch on his newly found sobriety, a change to his artistic and personal life process as he moves into the creation of his next album. Thundercat’s jazz was personal, and ergo, his personal sentiments were a part of it.
Amid his soul-soothing internal reflection and music, Thundercat had one main testament crucial to the process of his creation and traversal of the world:
”If you’re not having fun, what’s the f***ing point?”
This sentiment was echoed by the audience around and above him, a crowd that eagerly stood and spent the last few songs moving at Bruner’s request. After the final song, a fan rushed to the front with a hand-painted canvas and was quickly welcomed up to the stage for a hug and a handshake.
While Thundercat played to a nearly full Eastman Theatre, the streets were still packed with festivalgoers taking advantage of free shows. In the Wegmans Fusion Tent, local indie Americana act Public Water Supply drew crowds with frontman Iggy Marino’s unique, impassioned vocals. A frequent act at Rochester festivals, as well as a band that is often on tour, PWS is no stranger to the festival crowd. The band played songs from their forthcoming album, and the crowd swayed, nodded, and danced along.
Over on the Jazz Street Stage, Toronto’s Soul Stew was pleasing the rows and rows of people with familiar soul and R&B tunes, providing some much-needed color to the gray sky. There was barely any room to be moving around on Jazz Street, but that didn’t stop the fans at the front from dancing and waving their arms. The energy was unexpectedly high for a rather gloomy day. And Soul Stew knew how to hit those vibes just right, as the group started outlining the chord progression to the Grover Washington Jr and Bill Withers classic “Just the Two of Us,” the instant recognition locked the crowd in, and they started jamming immediately. The peak of excitement hit when the group set “September” by Earth, Wind and Fire out into the crowd, which really got people moving. Unfortunately, fewer people recognized “Sha-La-La (Make Me Happy)” by Al Green, which was a highlight for this group as the sha-la-la chorus rode the band out on a very nice vamp.
Over in the Big Tent, C.J. Chenier brought even more danceable grooves to the festival. Zydeco is a very unique music genre, and not just because it is led by the accordion. It is a fusion of the music traditions established by the Cajuns in southern Louisiana and early African American R&B, soul, and blues. It is niche for sure, but sonically interesting, well-received, and most importantly, it is some of the most fun music one could come across. Especially when you add the washboard into the mix—that’s just a guaranteed good time. The crowd in the Big Tent was certainly having a good time, as many took to the front to dance to the infectious grooves laid down by Chenier.
Chenier and his band played their music with a levity that allowed them to balance the audience’s attention with the purely fun spirit of the performance. The high energy, the textured sound of the accordion, the dual-wielded tambourines, and the washboard should have all been distracting, but instead, each piece came together in celebration. Chenier’s been busy too. Just the night before, he was celebrating the 100th birthday of his father, who is credited with popularizing and pioneering the Zydeco genre, inspiring decades of celebration.
Los Lonely Boys were the second free headliner of the festival, bringing what they call “Texican rock ’n’ roll” to Parcel 5. The three Mexican American brothers from San Angelo, Texas, blend rock, blues, Latin, country, and sometimes funk, to create a blend uniquely Texas, Mexican, and American. They are right, they really are “Texican Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
The brothers do not shy away from the massive influence their Christian faith has on their music. While not explicitly a Christian band, their hit song “Heaven” gained significant traction on Christian radio in the 2000s. Their most recent album was titled “Resurrection,” and they also began the show by thanking the Lord. This sense of spirituality added to a strong sense of comfort that the three had on stage. The band has been together since the 1990s, and they are brothers. That level of familiarity was so clear when the three of them took the stage.
When a band gets comfortable, they run the risk of being boring, but it is a strength for Los Lonely Boys, as their comfort led to an easy show to find enjoyment in, and even further it led to the comfort that the band hoped to give the audience with songs talking about being free, or just how nice it is to be alive. Los Lonely Boys was a great act to please the large Parcel 5 crowd.
Closing off the evening, Salami Joe Rose Louis came with synthesizer in hand and music in heart to the late-night sweet spot venue of The Duke. Seated at the stage and joined by a bassist and drummer, Louis tapped into the niche she knew best: soft lulling vocals in combination with spacey ambience and scattered electronic grit. Of course, this didn’t come without exploration: performance along with a live ensemble proved to be the new frontier for Louis, and one with which she meshed incredibly well.
Basking calmly in the pink light of the stage, her individual performance was a feat of many roles: a singer, a mixer, a wizard of synthetic sound, and spinner of many dials. The lightness of the sound washed the room in a gentle haze, carrying with it the deep sentimentality of Louis’ work and lyricism.
At the end of a long evening, Louis’ set proved to be the reflection and relaxation needed to close off the first week of the festival.
With only two days remaining of this year’s Jazz Fest, now’s the time to go. Whether you’re checking out a Club Pass show, visiting a headliner, or simply making conversation with friends in the open air, you’re bound to have a blast.
For the Beacon’s Jazz Fest coverage, click here.
Alex Holly is a student at the University of Rochester and a member of the Oasis Project’s second cohort. Jess Williams is a Beacon contributing writer and former intern.
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