Java Jazz at Twenty-One

Southeast Asia’s largest jazz festival just came of age. The purists grumbled. The city kept dancing.

Java Jazz turned twenty-one this year, which in most countries is the age at which you are finally trusted with everything. The twenty-first edition ran over the last weekend of May at NICE PIK2, ten-plus stages deep, with Jon Batiste opening the Friday, Ella Mai and wave to earth carrying the Saturday, and Daniel Caesar closing it out on Sunday night.

You can hear the purists already, because we heard them in the queue. An R&B singer, a Korean indie band and a neo soul heartthrob headlining a jazz festival. Every year the complaint, and every year the festival grows anyway, the way children grow: not according to plan, and not asking permission. Somewhere between 2005 and now, Java Jazz stopped being a genre event and became a calendar event, which is a promotion, not a betrayal.

And jazz, of all musics, should understand. It was born a port city music, made by people who absorbed everything that came off the boats and answered with something new. A festival in an archipelago port city that lets soul, R&B and lo-fi indie through the gates is not diluting the tradition. It is practising it.

Besides, the jazz is still there. It just is not on the posters. It lives on the side stages after ten, when the day crowd has gone home and the rooms thin out to the people who came to listen: The Groove with Tiara Effendy pulling three generations onto one floor, Rafi Sudirman, the young local rhythm sections trading choruses with whoever wandered in with a horn. The best set of any Java Jazz is always one you did not plan to attend, in a room you entered because the air conditioning was better.

Twenty-one editions also means the festival has become a unit of memory. People in this city measure their lives in Java Jazzes now: the edition where it rained through the outdoor stage, the edition of the first date, the edition attended with a friend who has since moved away. The music is the occasion, but the memory is the product. Nothing could be more familiar to this house.

We keep our own jazz in bottles, after all: a trumpeter’s momentum, a sapphire made of iris and leather, a chandelier dissolving into midnight. And when the festival is over and the city goes quiet, the Radio stays on. A festival at twenty-one is no longer a promise. It is a memory machine, running annually, and this city is lucky to own one.