Why should you go to the  21st AT&T San Jose Jazz Festival? What do you enjoy there? Would it be for the artists? Musical discoveries? Fun? Diversity? Dancing?  Here, four music lovers  decided to write a few words about it.

San Jose Jazz chooses an artist, five questions (same ones each times) and five answers. Here, the jazz saxophonist Pete Yellin who leads his own group, the Pete Yellin Quintet, agreed to play by the rules!

San Jose Jazz (SJJ): Tell us who you are.

Pete Yellin (PY): I'm Pete Yellin, a saxophonist from New-York now living in the east Bay for years. I play the alto sax mostly. I started playing at the age of 17, on clarinet. I was listening to jazz music and some of my friends were playing in their school bands so I thought it would be fun to try and learn an instrument. I was a basketball player in high school and received a scholarship to Denver University. At D.U., I went out and heard Art Pepper play the alto sax at a local club and decided to try to learn the sax. So when the 1st year was up, I got a sax and a teacher (with help from my musician dad) and picked it up pretty quickly. My teacher was on the staff at Juilliard Conservatory and he helped me get accepted there. I met many serious musicians there and they helped me get "gigs" and go to rehearsals and jam sessions.

Bruce Labadie, Festival Director, chose our tune of the month! He tells us about his music crush, Ruthie Foster, how he discovered her and how she is such a powerful perfomer.

 
              "I was travelling to Austin to attend the South By Southwest Music Festival in the late 1990's and stopped by to visit an agent, Nancy Fly. She gave me a cd of a solo artists she had just started representing, and after listening to her I grew to like what I heard.