Atlantic City Weekly

"The role of all of us in the group is to motivate each other to grow spiritually and as a group. Spirituality plays a great role in terms of giving each other a spiritual support. This is the thing I think each and every group should have." -- Odean Pope, interview with Gregg Hall for Catalyst's 1974 album Unity.

Cape May has a diverse slate of performers for the city's 31st jazz festival, which takes place this weekend (April 17-19) and has been dubbed "Legends and more Blues."

Here are a few things you should know.

James Cotton, the masterful blues harmonica player, will be performing on Saturday night at the Lower Regional High School Theatre for two sets.

This year's festival theme pays tribute to the late great jazz singers Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan.

Live music events will be happening on all three dates at various locations throughout Cape May (see sidebar for schedule and venues).

Weekend passes start at $150 and individual passes start at $25.

One of this year's performers hasn't played in southern New Jersey for a while -- Philadelphia jazz legend Odean Pope, who will be appearing with his quintet on Friday night for two sets (8:30 & 11pm) at Aleathea's Restaurant at the Inn of Cape May.

Although Pope is renowned around the globe for his husky and emotive tenor saxophone playing, his dynamic compositions and arrangements, and his long-standing (and innovative) Saxophone Choir -- not to mention his hipper than hip '70s Philly jazz-funk collective Catalyst -- the 70-year-old musician is no stranger to the Jersey Shore.

"I worked in Atlantic City quite a bit," says Pope during a recent phone conversation. "It was probably the mid-'60s, early '70s. As a matter of fact, I [sat in] there with Cannonball Adderley -- I think that was in the '60s. I was working in Atlantic City at the time and he was working [there] so he invited me to sit in with him. It was the last large club on the end there -- the Wonder Bar."

It's amazing that Pope's memory is so crisp. Having grown up as a young man in Philadelphia -- he moved to North Philly at the age of 10 from South Carolina -- and stumbling upon the opportunity to play, practice and learn from the likes of fellow young Philadelphians such as John Coltrane, Lee Morgan (who used to play Wildwood a lot during the summers of his early years), Archie Shepp, Benny Golson, Hasaan Ibn Ali and Ray Bryant, Pope's musical (and spiritual) path has led him to some interesting and beautiful places over the last several decades.

Decades after Coltrane chose Pope to replace him in the Hammond B3 master Jimmy Smith's group (because Trane was headed to New York to work with Miles Davis), Pope was a member of the esteemed Max Roach Quartet from 1979 to 2002. Pope has said that his experience studying and touring the world with Roach was "like going to one of the highest institutions in the whole world."

Yet, Pope still remembers fondly those early years working the clubs in Atlantic City's pre-casino days. "I also worked Club Harlem, and the club right across the street from Club Harlem," he remembers. "There were quite a few jazz clubs there. I worked there quite a few times."

During the 1960s Johnny Lynch, Pope recalls, was the bandleader at Club Harlem on Atlantic City's Kentucky Avenue.

"He was the bandleader at the Club Harlem that used to back people like Sammy Davis -- and all of the big groups that used to come in -- so I worked in the band a few times with him.