Keyboardist and composer George Whitty, pictured here on tour in Russia, will perform at the OIMB Boathouse on Sunday, July 20, during the Oregon Coast Music Festival. Contributed Photo

George Whitty concert looks to be highlight of 30th-annual music festival

The Oregon Coast Music Festival splashes down tomorrow at Mingus Park, resulting in a surge of music that will cover Coos County for the next two weeks.

“On The Waterfront” is the name of the free opening event, a catch-all handle that suggests salty breezes and a bustling boardwalk. The actual venue — a few blocks west of Coos Bay’s windy waterfront — offers grassy lounge space within a natural amphitheater surrounding the outdoor stage.

First into festival waters are local musicians: the Community Concert Band; acid/jazz combo Streptocarpus; and blues group, Soulpie. Then, four-member jazz/gypsy/Balkan funk band Taarka from Boulder, Colo., will slide into the Mingus Park lineup, led by the husband-and-wife team of classically trained renegade violinist Enion Pelta-Tiller, and musical polyglot David Tiller.

Locals have always enjoyed a place at the festival table. The Oregon Coast Music Association was founded in 1979 when Charles Heiden, conductor and founder of the Salem Symphony, joined community members with musicians from around the state to present the first Haydn Festival. Haydn’s 250th birthday in 1982 was reason enough to expand the program, and today the festival features two weeks of eclectic musical offerings within a dozen varied settings. Classical and chamber options have been joined this year by jazz, folk, reggae, and a local idiom described as “surf country.”

The professional musicians who comprise the Festival Orchestra hail from throughout the United States and abroad. They join guest artists of international renown, and on July 26 will support soloist Jon Nakamatsu in a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the 1,100-seat Marshfield Auditorium.

Musicians enjoy the smaller stages as well, and this year guest artist George Whitty will match his particular artistry to everyone’s favorite venue: the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology Boathouse, in Charleston.

Whitty is a Coos Bay native. Twenty-eight years ago, prior to his Grammy award and involvement with three other Grammy-winning records, his Grammy nominations, his Emmy nomination and his several international tours, George recalls playing at the firehouse on Cape Arago Highway, between Empire and Charleston. The Boathouse performance on July 20 will be his first with the Oregon Coast Music Festival.

He brings a pair of internationally-groomed musicians with him for the afternoon concert, describing Alan Jones as “the Northwest’s most original and accomplished drummer” and Sam Howard as “an extraordinary bassist” from New York.

Presuming Whitty’s unfamiliarity with The Boat-house, I described it to him as tiny and very atmospheric, “an afternoon-sunshine-champagne sort of venue.”

“Having grown up in Coos Bay,” he responded, “I assume this means raining buckets.”

The program, according to Whitty: “It’ll be a very mixed bag of everything we like to play, with a lot of heat but a lot of lyrical content as well. Probably four standards, three or four things by modern jazz composers (Kenny Wheeler, Chick Corea, Steve Swallow), three of my tunes (one funky organ tune, two other sort of poignant pieces) and two tunes by Alan Jones, our drummer who’s been writing great music for his sextet in Portland for the last few years.”

Wow. Added to the aforementioned champagne reception (with appetizers prepared by Black Market Gourmet), this limited-seating concert is sure to be a mid-festival high point.

Composer, master mixer, keyboardist and family man, George Whitty’s current big project is the scoring of his first feature film, “The Getdown.” Work originates from his home in the mountains east of Los Angeles, where he is in the process of building a “no-compromise, acoustically correct, totally sound-isolated studio in the large space at the bottom of the house.” And that’s not all. When not on the road this summer playing keyboards with David Sanborn, he continues to write music for “As the World Turns” (his 2006 Emmy award nomination), a gig he describes as “secretly one of the bests jobs in TV music.”

Following the Boathouse concert, Whitty returns to L.A. “Next week I’m mixing a couple cuts for Sanjaya Malakar’s CD (yes, Sanjaya from American Idol) for a producer friend in New York, as well as a couple big-band CDs by the Danish Radio Big Band.

So I’m way overextended, as always but, having been a self-employed musician for 26 years now, I’ll take overextended over underemployed any day.”

And we’ll take the George Whitty Trio anytime they’re out our way.

Teri Albert reviews art and artists for the Ballyhoo! page of The World. Comments on or story ideas for this column are welcome, and can be e-mailed to malbert3@verizon.net.