4 questions with Stanford Jazz Festival’s new executive director Cory Combs

A mainstay of Peninsula music is seeing some changes at the top but staying in tune with its founding mission. The Stanford Jazz Workshop, which for over 50 years has provided educational programming for young musicians and hosts the Stanford Jazz Festival each summer, has a new face at the helm. Bassist, composer and educator Cory Combs took over as executive director from David Miller in fall 2023. More changes are coming, as the organization’s founder and artistic director, Jim Nadel, also will be stepping down in the coming months.

Combs grew up in Wichita, Kansas, in a musical environment — his father was a percussion professor at Wichita State University — and he has an extensive background in music education, including at a number of Bay Area schools and organizations, such as SF Jazz.

“A unique element that I didn’t quite appreciate until I was really in the midst of booking (the festival) is that it’s so deeply entwined with the educational piece of the puzzle that many of our teaching artists that are there during the jazz Institute week, for example, headline at shows. The students get to interact with them all day and come see them at night … so that opens up a lot of possibilities, as we think about, like, OK, who’s going to be great for the week of teaching, and also do a killer show at night,” Combs said.

The Stanford Jazz Festival evolved from Stanford Jazz Workshop programming, making the most of having a lineup of top musicians on hand to teach summer programs for middle school and high school student musicians.

The Stanford Jazz Festival offers nearly 30 shows featuring well over 100 top jazz musicians through Aug. 3 this year.

Ahead of the festival, we spoke with Cory Combs about his first year with the organization and what audiences can expect at this year’s festival. (This conversation has been edited for length.)

Palo Alto Weekly: What drew you to a leadership role with Stanford Jazz Workshop?

Cory Combs: My career trajectory started on the artistic side, as a performer, but then also in the classroom as a music teacher. I spent a lot of years starting and running music programs at private middle schools and high schools in the Bay Area. I founded the music program at Waldorf High School and also at the Nueva School. I did a lot with them, and then those doors opened me up to positions in arts nonprofit management and leadership, and I was fortunate enough to get the door opened at SF jazz as their director of education, so that that kind of made a path for me to say, ‘yeah, I really enjoy being on the inside of an organization, creating programs, creating curriculum, working with wonderful teaching artists and musicians and art and performers.’ So I continued on that path for a while, before Stanford Jazz, with a great, small nonprofit called Intermusic, which is dedicated toward supporting professional musicians in the Bay Area. And that was my first executive director position. I did that for six years, and fortunately, that allowed me to leverage experience. When this role at Stanford Jazz Workshop opened up, I immediately threw my hat in the ring, because I knew the founder, Jim Nadel. I knew the strength of the organization. I had already been involved in networking with it for quite some time in terms of musician friends that have taught there, and knowing the reputation.

Palo Alto Weekly: What has your first year been like as executive director?

Combs: It’s been great. When you start in an organization, I’ve come to know that the first year is when you fasten your seatbelt, you do everything you can to ensure that it’s smooth. So I come in with the attitude of really trying to help an organization like this continue to thrive. It’s gone in that way, really well, and also because I’ve had this transitional support from Jim the founder and David the executive director, I haven’t had the usual pitfalls to step into that I wouldn’t have even known, because that’s always the case when you start something new, that you don’t know the mistakes you’re making. 

I was able to, fortunately, draw on the experience I’ve had in terms of producing festivals and running summer camps, and so I’ve had a great deal of relevant experience, and that allowed me to feel like I wasn’t coming in in the dark.

Palo Alto Weekly: Tell me about this year’s festival lineup. It looks like there’s a wide variety of offerings as usual.

Combs: We approached it with this notion that we want to feature amazing local talent as always and highlight some of our star jazz performers right here in the Bay Area. That’s, I think, always been a centerpiece of the Workshop’s work, and definitely a centerpiece of mine, is to appreciate everyone that’s just right in our own backyard. Some of those artists are the Destiny Muhammad Quartet. She’s this amazingly fun and energetic jazz harpist that leads her own group. She just puts on this great show, often doing some of her own originals, but also maybe harkening back to Alice Coltrane. Tiffany Austin is another local star that we just think is an amazing vocalist. 

Knowing that we have these benchmarks of local talent that we want to highlight, we build the festival around some of our Saturday nights where we’re going to bring in a touring act.

Our opening night is with Ambrose Akinmusire and his Owl Song (trio). This project is super cool because it features a trio, and the trio’s guitarist Bill Frisell has just always been an absolute favorite of mine, and New Orleans drummer Herlin Riley. Ambrose is known as one of the absolute top-tier trumpeters in the world. He’s done this recording, and typically a jazz band will have a bass or a keyboard, and so he’s stripped away to this very sparse and open sound, and created this recording that has been described as one of the best jazz recordings in the last decade.

We also build (the lineup) around some people that have played the festival before, like Anat Cohen — she always puts on just an incredible show. She’s doing her Brazilian act with Quartetinho. We have some first-time performers like Cuban pianist Aldo López Gavilán, who is a virtuosic Cuban pianist. … Then we also, of course, try to feature some artists that are well-established veterans that have been in the industry for ages and doing such important work, and that’s someone like George Cables, who is coming back to do a week of teaching and also to do a performance on a festival evening. 

We really think about that combination of who’s teaching, who’s touring, who we can bring in, and that highlights local talent. The other great part that I love about this festival is it very much keeps jazz in the center of it, that we have the luxury to really focus on the art form of jazz, which, of course, is wide and encompassing lots of different styles. So it’s by no means limited to just one thing, but it’s truly a jazz festival.

Palo Alto Weekly: As you said, ​​the integration of the workshop and the festival is so unique. What do you hope that audiences learn about jazz from attending a festival show?

Combs: We do a couple of interesting programs before the festival called Jazz Inside Out, which are unique combinations of performance and education, where we have a jazz band on stage that then peels back the curtain a little bit to talk to the audience about what they’re hearing. That’s part of the programming that we’re going to continue to try to expand and grow —  not only do you come to a performance for the musical content, but knowing you’re going to come away with some knowledge about the culture of jazz, where it came from, what it is you’re listening to.

As people come to the festival, it’s not going to be the same (as that) — these aren’t lecture performances. But so many jazz musicians and basically everyone that’s on our festival (roster), they’re all such incredible educators that they are of course, going to talk about their music and what the audience is hearing and what’s inspired them. So we definitely want people to come away with a sense of connection to the artists and a sense of that joy that the artists will always bring. My love of live jazz music is always just amplified when I see a show that’s steeped in that tradition of sharing that care, and again, passion for the music and whatever angle they’re coming at it from. Essentially, if someone comes out loving jazz even more than when they came in, I’d say that would be the win.

Festival opener Ambrose Akinmusire Owl Song performs June 21, 7:30 p.m. at Bing Concert Hall. Tickets are $30-$100.
The Stanford Jazz Festival takes place through Aug. 3 at various venues on the Stanford University campus and ticket prices vary by concert. stanfordjazz.org.