SAN DIEGO — With a record-setting temperature of 103 degrees, things heated up fast on Saturday in Escondido before a single note was played on the third day of the third annual San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival.

To add to the sizzle, the first and third of the five featured bands — Charlie Chavez y su Afrotruko and Lucia & The Family Gutierrez — performed on the festival’s outdoor stage. It was set up on the lawn of California Center for the Arts, Escondido, adjacent to the very nicely air-conditioned concert hall where the other three acts played.

Like their audience, the groups led by Chavez and Lucia were commendably undaunted by the elements. Their indomitable spirit and musical skill made braving the sun both a badge of honor and a cause for celebration that the show did, indeed, go on.

“I just want to acknowledge the weather today. You here are jazz heroes,” said festival co-founder Daniel Atkinson, who then referenced France’s famed “Le Jazz Hot” movement of the 1930s. “Today, we’re going to introduce ‘Le Jazz Caliente!’”

While the heat was indisputable, what made the day especially memorable were the sterling musical performances by each of the five featured bands. Their members hail from the U.S., Mexico, Panama, Cuba and Europe. The music they made highlighted exactly how well jazz transcends borders and unifies performers and listeners alike.

That, in a nutshell, is the raison d’être of this homegrown festival, which debuted in 2024 after Qualcomm co-founder Irwin M. Jacobs provided nearly $400,000 in seed money for the event’s first three years. Jacobs and his son, Paul, were among Saturday’s 1,100 attendees at the festival, which concluded its four-day run with a free outdoor concert Sunday in downtown Tijuana. The temperature there rose to 102 degrees.

In both cities, the size of the audiences grew as evening approach and the temperatures dropped into the 90s and then the high 80s. Four of the five artists — Danilo Perez, the Brian Blade Fellowship Band, Mingus Dynasty, and Lucia & The Family Gutierrez — performed in both cities.

Drummer Blade and pianist Perez are both Grammy Award winners. So are at least three members of the Mingus Dynasty band — trombonist Conrad Herwig, saxophonist Wayne Escoffery and Russian-born bassist Boris Kozlov. Their inspired performances Saturday took place indoors.

The day-opening set by Chavez and his brassy band on the outdoor stage was so ebullient it inspired a number of attendees to dance and sway under the blazing sun. Ditto the uplifting outdoor performance by Lucia, who also memorably sang at last year’s festival, and in 2022 became the first Mexican artist to win top honors at the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition.

She was joined Saturday by The Family Gutierrez, a sextet from Veracruz that performs traditional son jarocho music and features her father, Ramon, on vocals and the guitar-like requinto, and her brother, Santiago, on vocals and the box-like Peruvian percussion instrument known as a cajon.

Son jarocho, Lucia told the audience, “is about community, like jazz.” To underscore her point, during the buoyant song “El Torito Jarocho” she delivered a delightfully agile scat vocal solo that suggested what Ella Fitzgerald might have sounded liked if she’d grown up in Veracruz rather than New York.

Lucia’s performance came immediately after Danilo Perez teamed with the San Diego State University Jazz Ensemble and a quintet that featured SDSU jazz studies honcho Brian Levy on tenor sax and fellow SDSU faculty member Gilbert Castellanos on trumpet.

Highlights included: the infectious “Lumen,” which featured a spirited percussion cameo by Charlie Chavez; the pulsating “Alternate Realities,” which Perez dedicated to former Black Panther mainstay and UC San Diego graduate student Angela Davis; “Suite for the Americas,” which saw the student musicians deftly negotiate intricate melodic voicings and rhythmic shifts; and “Panama Libre,” in which Perez soloed with bluesy verve and led the audience in wordless call-and-response exchanges.

The two-woman, five-man Mingus Dynasty achieved the range and power of a full big band. From their opening selection, the galvanizing Charlie Parker homage, “Gunslinging Bird,” to their set-closing “Tonight at Noon,” the group repeatedly soared from one heady peak to another. Each member was given ample space to shine. Pianist Helen Sung and saxophonist Sarah Hanahan were especially impressive, both for their instrumental virtuosity and the finely honed musicality they brought to every note.

Drum marvel Brian Blade and his Fellowship Band brought the night to a close with a performance that favored understatement and lithe ensemble work over bravura solos. As the band’s name suggests, its songs are rooted as much in gospel music as jazz and the reverence they brought to such selections as “Look To The Hills,” “Migration” and the set-closing “Duality” were marvels of cogent interplay by a group whose members listen to each other with at least as much intensity as they play.

This year’s festival expanded to four days, one more than last year’s edition, and drew a total of 5,800 people. It’s too soon to tell if the 2027 iteration of this borders-leaping event will expand even more. And the logistical and financial challenges of staging an event this ambitious in both San Diego and Tijuana are surely daunting.

But when the music repeatedly rises to such a level of excellence — while demonstrating the power of jazz to uplift audiences and bridge cultures — well, the sky’s the limit.

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