Even though Jimmy Lyons had left San Francisco for the more pastoral environment of Big Sur on the Central Coast in 1953, he didn’t stray far from being a jazz impresario or deejay. In 1955, he began a series of jazz concerts at the Sunset School Auditorium in Carmel, billed as “Jimmy Lyons Presents.” MJF board member Jim Costello recalled: “[The shows] were scheduled on Monday nights, because the musicians were usually en route from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Because it was a work night, the concerts were only one set.” The concerts were booked in late summer and early autumn, considered “shoulder season,” when not much else was going on around Monterey Bay. The concept of West Coast jazz hadn’t yet made the journey from the hip San Francisco scene, but Lyons would bring jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Cal Tjader, Dave Brubeck, and Ella Fitzgerald to the Monterey Peninsula as he struggled to find backers in the community for his nascent idea for festival.

In September of 1955, Lyons brought pianist Erroll Garner and his trio to the Sunset Center, which featured drummer Denzil Best and bassist Eddie Calhoun. By a stroke of luck, a local fan had brought a clunky Ampex 600 tape recorder to the concert. Martha Glaser, Garner’s manager, confiscated the tapes and brought them to New York City, where they eventually became Concert by the Sea, a hit LP for Columbia Records that remains to this day one of the best-selling albums in the annals of jazz. Slowly but surely, the Jimmy Lyons Presents series built up local support for a jazz festival that would compete with the recently-established Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. Erroll Garner’s Concert by the Sea was the event – and album – that suddenly brought national attention to the area and created a roadmap and appetite for a jazz festival on the Monterey Peninsula.

Erroll would only perform at the Monterey Jazz Festival once during his lifetime, in 1971. But in 2015, 60 years after the original Concert by the Sea, Monterey Jazz Festival presented the Erroll Garner Project on the Arena Stage, which featured pianists Geri Allen, Jason Moran, and Christian Sands as a historic revisiting of one of the Monterey Peninsula’s most famous concerts, in conjunction to the national release of the complete recordings from September 19, 1955.

Timeless and connected, indeed.

This article was adapted from various sources, including a print story written by Mike Katz for the MJF58 Souvenir Program in 2015.