Jazz will fill streets, parks and venues in Bellefonte this weekend as the 2009 Summer Jazz Celebration presented by JazzPA forges on despite tragedy and economic adversity.

This year's festival, which takes place Friday and Saturday, will feature performances from acclaimed national artists and local talents alike and commemorate the life of the festival's recently-deceased founder, Joe Alessandro.

Catherine Dupuis, artistic director for the festival, said as a local jazz musician, Alessandro was a mentor for musicians in the area.

"He was the moral support for making it happen and keeping it going," Dupuis said.

Alessandro, who died in December, was so immersed in music, she added, that even at the age of 85, the saxophone player was taking piano lessons just to keep "delving deeper."

Dupuis said everyone involved with the festival is saddened by his passing, but the event is a gift he left behind and something for the entire community to look forward to every summer.

"He was ill for a long time, so there is a blessing to know he can listen to the music from where he is now," she said.

The festival will feature some special numbers in Alessandro's honor and locals who will talk about what he did to help make the festival what it is today.

Downtown Bellefonte will be home to the festival for the second year in a row, which artistic director for the festival Catherine Dupuis said is a very "scenic" location for the event. She added there has been a lot of support for the festival from the Bellefonte community, which is good for JazzPA because it is a completely volunteer-driven organization.

The celebration festivities will also be lengthened slightly from last year, Dupuis said, even though the festival has been "substantially impacted" by the current economy.

Local saxophonist Rick Hirsch, who will perform at the festival with the band Liquid Jazz, said the organization's perseverance and its ability to keep the festival alive says a lot about the strength of JazzPA and about the level of the support the festival gets from the community.

"Some of the biggest festivals in the country are just folding," he said. "I think that says a lot -- that the festival is going on in the face of this."

Charlie Heim (graduate-music education), a performer and co-founder of the band Megalodon, said free concerts like the Summer Jazz Celebration are great things for locals to support and people are always going to want to listen to live music no matter what the economic situation is. Heim and his friend Greg Johnson started the band.

"It's outdoors. It's all free, and it's a family affair," he said about the festival. "It's not in a smokey jazz bar with an elite audience."

Arthur Goldstein, a professor of music history at Penn State and also a performer in a local jazz quartet at this year's festival, said despite the economy, the festival does seem to have a "steady growth curve upward" from year to year. He said this provides the local audience with an excellent day's worth of music of many different sorts.

"It exposes them to people they may not see routinely," he said, "people from out of town who are world class musicians."

Dupuis said all performances usually get a "unanimous ecstatic" responses from festival attendees -- even from those who may not be as familiar with the jazz genre.

"Most people would be very surprised that all of the music they like is based in jazz," she said. "Folks may think it's music that's deterrent to them, but then they realize 'yeah, this is stuff I like.' "

David Finck, a bassist from New York who will play in a featured ensemble performance on Saturday night, said jazz has influenced every pop artist since Elvis Presley whether these artists or the listeners of their music know it or not. He added jazz is also a genre of music that is representative of America in that it is a mixture of different cultures and is based on the idea of freedom.

"Once people understand it, they see it and embrace it," he said.

Hirsch said the improvised nature of live jazz performance is something that makes an audience "latch onto" artists.

"They're really in the musical moment, and there's a lot of extemporaneous communication going on," he said. "It's very exciting and compelling."

Hirsch said the songs performed by him and the band are different every time the band plays because they are constructed with "enough room for variation."

Goldstein said that because so much of jazz relies on improvisation, there is a special challenge not to repeat himself musically and to try to make something "fresh" for each audience to which he performs.

He added that jazz is also like a "cousin" to rock because both genres stem from the common sources of blues, which is not only something that appeals to him as a jazz musician, but may also appeal to college-age students as listeners.

"Not all college students only like contemporary popular music," he said, drawing from his experience as a professor. "I think [they] respect craft and discipline and good performance like anybody else, really."

Heim said studying and working with jazz music for a long time has made the genre his "main drive in music" for a while. He added that even as a college-age musician, the energy jazz provides, along with the technical and musical challenge, is what appeals to him the most.

The band Heim will perform with on Saturday attempts to link jazz, rock and pop, even though Megalodon is not necessarily a "fusion" band. Megalodon just recently played at the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, and Heim said he hopes that the performance at the JazzPA festival will also make his music available to a diverse audience.

"It's not high brow jazz stuff," he said. "We're getting down and dirty with the stuff we're playing."

Finck said there's a lot about jazz that can appeal to people but that it does not reach as many young people because it has never been marketed the same way that popular music has. He specifically questioned how some universities tend to spend more on sports activities than those that pertain to music and educating people about it.

"It's not that I have a problem with sports, but these are educational institutions, and arts are an important part of education."

Dupuis said as a "jazz person," she would love to see jazz become more accessible to students through campus activities.

"I'd love there to be more, that's why JazzPA is so interested in promoting what we do," she said.