San Jose Jazz Winter Fest brings legendary Cookers back to Bay Area

At its best, San Jose Jazz’s Winter Fest brims with legendary musicians who’ve played an essential role in defining and expanding jazz’s adventurous post-bop vocabulary. And that’s just in one concert.

With a lineup featuring two newly minted National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters, The Cookers is far more than an all-star aggregation. It’s a bona fide, long-running band boasting a book bristling with compositions that guide and fuel hi-octane improvisation.

Running Feb. 11-27 at venues around the South Bay, Winter Fest has at its home base San Jose Jazz’s intimate Break Room, where The Cookers perform Feb. 25.

Powered by drummer Billy Hart, who returns to the Bay Area March 31 to accept an NEA Jazz Master award with vocalist Casandra Wilson and bassist Stanley Clarke at the SFJAZZ Center, The Cookers also play Yoshi’s Feb. 23 and Kuumbwa Jazz Center Feb. 24.

“I’m 80 years old, so it was the last call I expected to get,” said Hart, who got his start on the Washington, D.C., scene in the early 1960s working with Shirley Horn. “I’m sitting there looking at the phone thinking, did he just say what I thought he said? I’m lucky and grateful to be playing at this age. It’s certainly unexpected.”

Hart may have been caught off guard, but he’s long overdue for the honor, like four of his fellow Cookers who’ve been nominated in past years but have yet to be tapped by the NEA. As the band’s senior core, the five players have been in jazz’s vanguard since the 1960s and over the years their paths have crossed on dozens of recordings and bands.

“We’ve all got other things going on in addition to The Cookers,” said Cables, 77, the youngest of band’s senior cadre. “But we’ve all played with each other in different situations. We’ve grown up together and when we come back we’re not trying to play like we did when we were 20 or 30. We’re doing what we do right now, expressing how we’ve grown separately and together.”

Among their formative experiences as young players Cables and tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, 79, toured with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Hart and trumpeter Eddie Henderson, 81, made history in Herbie Hancock’s San Francisco-based band Mwandishi (the pioneering electro-acoustic ensemble that preceded the Headhunters). They’re all distinguished bandleaders who’ve recorded extensively under their own names.

At 86, bassist Cecil McBee is the senior Cooker, and he’s been a three-star Michelin player since he anchored tenor sax star Charles Lloyd’s quartet that earned international renown with “Forest Flower,” the million-selling album recorded live at the 1966 Monterey Jazz Festival.

The band’s youngest member, 57-year-old trumpeter David Weiss, is also the head chef who first assembled the group for a concert at the 2007 Healdsburg Jazz Festival. A respected arranger who leads several other ensembles, he wanted to create a showcase for veteran masters with significant portfolios of compositions.

Like the band’s five previous albums, 2021’s “Look Out!” features awe-inspiring group interplay on a program of original material. In many cases the composers recorded their tunes previously with smaller configurations. As the band’s primary arranger, Weiss adopts the pieces “to makes them more sparkling, more intense, clearer and sharper,” Hart said.

“David wants to have compositional representation from all of us,” the drummer continued. “He makes the Cookers’ arrangements sound like one band, like we have one mind compositionally.”

New Orleans alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, the Cooker who was awarded the 2022 A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy, isn’t on this tour. The alto chair is being covered by Berkeley High alum Craig Handy, a founding member of The Cookers who played on the band’s first three albums during his seven-year tenure.

Best known for his extensive work in the Mingus Big Band and Mingus Dynasty, Handy has stayed in close proximity to his former bandmates, like contributing to several tracks on the 2016 album “The George Cables Songbook” (he joins the Cables Trio bassist, former Jazz Messenger Essiet Okon Essiet, and San Jose drummer Sylvia Cuenca Feb. 27 at Piedmont Piano and March 5 at Mr. Tipples).

With Handy back in the mix, The Cookers still boast the most formidable lineup of any band its size. “We have our own voice and our own concept of playing,” Cables said. “There are seven strong personalities that come together to make one big personality.”

Contact Andrew Gilbert at [email protected].

THE COOKERS

When & where: 8 p.m. Feb. 23 at Yoshi’s, Oakland; $33-$74; www.yoshis.com; 7 p.m. Feb. 24, at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz; $47.25-$52.50; www.kuumbwajazz.org; at San Jose Jazz Winterfest, 9 p.m. Feb. 25; SJZ Break Room, San Jose; $30-$40; sanjosejazz.org/winterfest