Scene & heard

"April in Paris" is a famous standard of the jazz repertoire. "April in Boston" is a less recognizable phrase. But if the vision of JazzBoston -- a broad coalition of local jazz activists -- bears out, Boston will strut its stuff as a global capital of the music starting tomorrow, as the city's first official Jazz Week in more than two decades begins.

Jazz Week offers more than 150 events -- concerts, lectures, discussions, and family events -- at 50 venues in the city and suburbs. It begins tomorrow with a double bang: a concert at the Berklee Performance Center to benefit the Habitat for Humanity Musicians Village in New Orleans, and a performance at Newton South High School of the Makanda Project , with Yoron Israel , Charlie Kohlhase , and veterans of the great 1990s combo the Roxbury Blues Aesthetic.

Though national acts -- Ellis Marsalis, Frank Foster -- are coming through, the emphasis of Jazz Week is the large and often uncelebrated local scene. By the time of the final performances on April 29 -- a tribute to Duke Ellington at the Museum of Fine Arts and a showcase of jazz-electronica hybrids at Berklee -- listeners should have no doubt as to the strength of jazz in Boston past, present, and future.

Organized by a year-old alliance of jazz artists, promoters, and aficionados called JazzBoston, the event revives the Jazz Weeks that were held from 1973 to 1983 by a group called the Jazz Coalition. Trumpeter Mark Harvey, musical director of the long-running Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, was one of the core activists behind that annual celebration and is now the co-leader of the new Jazz Week.

In those days, Harvey says, Boston jazz faced dire challenges, particularly compared to the golden age of the 1950s and early 1960s, when close to a dozen major clubs jostled for space near the intersection of Columbus and Massachusetts avenues in the South End, an after-hours scene thrived, and luminaries like Duke Ellington made regular visits.

"The '70s were a pretty far cry from the '50s," Harvey says. By that point, the South End scene had long succumbed, and the two main venues for national acts were the Jazz Workshop at Paul's Mall in the Back Bay and Lenny's on the Turnpike in Peabody.

Local musicians had few outlets, Harvey says. The music was going through transitions in the early '70s, with the growth of jazz-rock fusion on one side and experimental, free jazz on another. "I played in both of those scenes," Harvey says. "And particularly for free jazz, it was very hard to find places to play."

The Jazz Coalition emerged as a self-help effort by musicians to grow the audience and colonize new venues. Thanks to Harvey, who is also a minister, they found a home in the Old West Church, and later Emmanuel Church and the Church of the Covenant on Newbury Street. The churches hosted the group's main event, an all-night concert -- "with breakfast for the survivors," Harvey says -- that came to anchor the annual Jazz Week.

In parallel, Boston in the '70s had a loft scene, where musicians steeped in the post-Coltrane aesthetic, with its attention to black politics and diverse spiritual traditions, could work on their own terms. The scene at the Friends of Great Black Music loft, hosted by drummer Sid Smart, gave birth to the John Coltrane Memorial Concert, an annual event that is perhaps Boston's most important and enduring organic jazz institution.

For a time, this grass-roots activity paid off, Harvey says: "Through the early 1980s, things began to flower. There was a catalytic energy going around." But by 1983, a struggling economy and the near-withdrawal of major labels from jazz got the better of the scene. "We burned out," Harvey says. "It was hard to find funding, and the tradition stopped."

Today's Jazz Week takes place in a transformed context where anguished questions like "Is jazz dead?" are no longer relevant. Jazz weathered the storm behind the rise of a new generation of musicians (the so-called "young lions"), revived commercial interest, and the proliferation of jazz education programs in schools and universities.

For Boston, this transformation brought rewards. Quality venues reemerged, now anchored by Scullers and Regattabar. And the city became a jazz capital by dint of its role as an education center. Berklee and New England Conservatory graduates saturate jazz today.

But though Boston's place in jazz is not in question, the local scene still faces problems that the JazzBoston activists hope to remedy. For one thing, says Leonard Brown, a saxophonist and professor at Northeastern and the head of the John Coltrane Memorial Concert, most Boston listeners simply don't know how rich the local scene is.

"There's a tendency to get into habits, to go to certain spots. People are used to going to Wally's, Scullers, Regattabar, but there's a lot of venues we've got going around," Brown says. "We want people to understand how much jazz there is in the Boston area."

The Jazz Week calendar confirms this in abundance: churches, high schools, community centers, bookstores, restaurants, and bars and cafes are all in the mix. Pauline Bilsky, JazzBoston's executive director, points out that many events are ones that would be taking place in a regular week; it's simply taken Jazz Week to highlight them under a common banner.

But the Boston jazz scene also faces some peculiar challenges. One is how to retain some of the talent that leaves town each year. Another is how to properly value what Harvey calls "the indigenous scene" -- Boston's many professional musicians who might or might not teach at the schools but belong as much to the tradition in which jazz is transmitted through apprenticeship and osmosis, not curricula.

Brown points out that it's hard for these musicians to compete for gigs. "Some of us have been playing here for up to 40 years," he says. "But a lot of promoters will go for a developing musician" -- one who costs less to book. As a result, Brown says, many of Boston's finest musicians are known for having trained major stars but are themselves rarely heard in local venues.

This paradox, Brown says, impoverishes the local scene and reinforces a tendency to distance jazz from its African-American heritage. It's a potential hidden cost of the embrace of jazz as "America's music" in public culture and educational institutions.

To this and other issues, the Jazz Week organizers offer a big-tent, grass-roots approach that seeks to celebrate all of the music's subgenres, hybrids, and political and aesthetic tendencies -- what Harvey calls the "joyful eclecticism" that is the heart of jazz.

Success, Harvey says, will be "a good turnout, a lot of events, a lot of buzz on the street, on the Internet, in the blogosphere." The plan is to make Jazz Week a yearly event once more, a major moment on the Boston cultural calendar that will draw visitors as well.

Brown, meanwhile, is savoring the moment. "I think it's a success already," he says, "because we're pulling it off!"