*“Change” was the optimal defining term for this year’s Blue Note Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl. The mid-June Jazz event that started out in 1979 as the “Playboy Jazz Festival,” later morphing ...

ST. LOUIS — The video board at Enterprise Center, normally hanging high above the ice, was lowered last week. The digital graphics lighting it up featured a Blue Note never seen before in St. Louis.

In the past, the Playboy and Hollywood Bowl Jazz festivals thrived on a carnival-esque cornucopia of styles. When Hugh Hefner first launched the Playboy Jazz Festival, the billings consisted almost ...