34th Annual Jazz Fest Bringin’ it June 14 & 15

The Alexander City Jazz Festival is a draw to music fans from all over the nation featuring past performers such as Zac Brown Band, St. Paul & the Broken Bones and Delta Rae. For over 30 years, this free-to-attend event has rocked Central Alabama with jazz, blues and southern rock. Alexander City Jazz Fest celebrates its 34th anniversary this year and promises to uphold the tradition with extraordinary acts. Please join us for one of Alexander City and Lake Martin’s biggest events of the year.

The Lineup

Friday Night

Strand Park, Downtown Alexander City
6pm

Benjamin Russell High School Jazz Band

Grant Green Jr. Group

Gregory Green, known professionally as Grant Green Jr., is a jazz guitarist and the eldest son of jazz guitarist Grant Green.  Born in St Louis, Missouri on August 4, 1955, Grant Green Jr. started playing guitar at the age of fourteen. In 1969, he moved to Detroit with his father, who died ten years later. His neighbors included Stevie Wonder’s parents, Marvin Gaye, and members of the Four Tops. He has worked with Richard Groove Holmes, Leon Thomas, Jimmy McGriff, Lou Donaldson, and Lonnie Smith.  His most recent release, the 11-song album Thank You Mr. Bacharach Vol 1 and 2 features Susan Tedeschi, who provides lead vocals for “What The World Needs Now Is Love.”
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J & The Causeways

At the core of soul music is a vibrant, embracing spirit, one aimed at connecting the dots of humanity that reside on both sides of the microphone.

In a serendipitous sequence of events, J & The Causeways was formed at the legendary Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans. A juggernaut soul/R&B ensemble, the group is filled with heavy backbeats and a soaring horn section, all swirling around the magnetic vocal stylings of Jordan Anderson, lead singer/keyboardist.

“We definitely shine live because each and every member of this band loves to be onstage and in that genuine moment of performance,” Anderson says. “New Orleans is home to some of the finest singers and musicians on the planet, which also means you have to bring your A-game to every single show — you’re representing this city and the long history of beautiful music that’s been created here.”

As a kid, Anderson was first exposed to the power of music from his grandmother, a piano teacher in his small rural Louisiana hometown. It was her backroom record collection that mesmerized Anderson, where he found himself thumbing through the vinyl and discovering the likes of Otis Redding, Al Green, Queen, and Aretha Franklin.

“I learned early on to not fall into the vanilla variety of pitch,” Anderson says. “It’s about finding a certain power that you can harness with the pure emotion of your voice, which is what all of those singers had — finding that spectrum of vocalists who put it all out there for the audience.”

With J & The Causeways, Anderson is fronting a band that finds itself mentioned in the same breath as the likes of St. Paul & The Broken Bones, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, and The Marcus King Band — all modern-day entities of passion and purpose, each summoning the pulsating, endless energy of soul/R&B music.
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Saturday Night

The AMP on Lake Martin
6pm

Sofia Goodman Group

Even if a fire hadn’t destroyed her flat in Boston, Sofia Goodman would have made her mark as one of the most promising young drummers, composers, and bandleaders of our time. But it did, and if that had anything to do with the excellence that she has already achieved, well, let it burn. Goodman remembers the day well. “I was there when the fire started,” she says. “I only had time to run out with my cymbal bag, my snare drum, and my computer, just hoping for the best. It was like, ‘If I don’t die here, what are the things I’ll want to do?’ And what I wanted to do was to play music.”

At the time, affordable rent brought Goodman to Nashville to live with some friends where she could practice and play often. Goodman thought she would eventually move to New York. Despite its reputation as the center of country music, Nashville was also home base for a community of jazz artists. Their welcoming vibe and depth of talent persuaded her to stay. And it’s from their ranks that she assembled The Sofia Goodman Group, her platform for creation onstage and in studios.

She also became a regular at Wally’s Cafe Jazz Club, first as a listener and then as an occasional guest of the house band—a pivotal experience for her. By the time she’d settled in Nashville in 2012, she had cultivated her own distinctive sound as a drummer, grounded in a matched-grip technique more common in rock than jazz. She familiarized herself with Music City as she had at Wally’s, by sitting in with bands. She played with blues legend Bobby Rush and soul and R&B legend Latimore in Italy where her performance was reviewed as “Brilliant” by Tony Rounce of Ace Records. Finally, around 2016, she put her own group together and began booking it wherever she could, often in restaurants to provide background music. The more she worked, the more word of her prowess spread, to the point that she felt ready to shift from covering standards to performing her own material, a refocusing indicated by her changing the band’s name to The Sofia Goodman Group.

Since then, the group has expanded its base beyond Music City. They’ve appeared at Alabama’s Alex City Jazz Festival, the Southern Miss Jazz & Blues Festival at the University of Southern Mississippi, the Kentucky Heritage Jazz Festival, the Elkhart Jazz Festival, and the West Georgia Jazz Festival, among others. Back home, the Nashville Music Industry Awards nominated the group for Best Jazz Album honors in 2018, then singled out Goodman as a nominee for Best Jazz Instrumentalist in 2020. Somehow, she found time to polish her writing chops by earning a Master’s degree from the Belmont University School of Music.
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The Grayson Capps Band

Grayson Capps is relaxed. You can hear it in the tone of his voice when he speaks, in the thoughtful, laconic way he reflects on the sometimes-tumultuous course of his life and work. It’s not the sound of complacency or comfort, but rather of personal growth and understanding. Capps is not without worry or darkness in his life, but he’s reached a kind of peace with it, an unhurried acceptance that enables him to write with unflinching honesty and remarkable humanity.

Hailed by NPR’s Mountain Stage for his “unbridled energy and authenticity,” Capps first emerged as a solo artist in 2005 following stints in the New Orleans thrash folk band the House Levelers, which he joined while still a student studying theater at Tulane, and his subsequent blues-rock group, Stavin’ Chain. His proper debut released under his own name. If You Knew My Mind earned rave reviews, with the New Orleans Times Picayune writing that “his character-based narratives are guaranteed to make you ache and exult” and Exclaim! calling it “a Southern gothic tour de force.” After Hurricane Katrina forced Capps to relocate to Franklin, TN, he went on to release a string of similarly exalted albums that earned him devoted followings in both the US and Europe, including 2006’s ‘Wail & Ride,’ which JamBase said “hums with quiet wisdom and unforced momentum;” 2007’s ‘Songbones,’ described by All Music as “poetry filled with the bloody glory and taut acceptance of real life on the bottom;” and 2008’s ‘Rott & Roll,” an album that prompted American Songwriter to declare, “Take the poetry of Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt, combine with Steve Earle’s edgy attitude and stir with a little cup of the bayou-blues (think Howlin’ Wolf) and you start to get a taste of Capps’s scrumptious gothic gumbo.”
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