Every year at the end of the Rochester International Jazz Festival, as the final shows let out and the crowds disperse for the last time, clean-up crews spring to action and a sad feeling descends over Gibbs Street. After nine days straight, it's hard to accept that it'll be a whole year before our town experiences this kind of excitement again. One way to offset the party's-over blues, of course, is to take a cue from a time-honored Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade tradition and head to the festival site the night before it begins to observe the set-up and stoke your anticipation. Last night's rain put a damper on the opportunity to do that, but you don't need to witness the construction of the stages and tents to know that the city is already abuzz.

And with good reason, as an overwhelming variety of music awaits our eager ears. This year, for the third time, the Lutheran Church on Chestnut Street will host Scandinavian acts exclusively. The past two years, these Nordic Series shows at the Lutheran Church have been the talk of the festival, as Rochester audiences discovered en masse what European jazz afficionados have known for years: that some of the most vital jazz being made in the world today is comes from Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. It's also great to see that Christ Church on East Ave, a lovely venue that came onboard for the first time last year, will again host its own series, this time a program of British artists. (I myself plan to hit just about every show at both of these venues.)

Perhaps most exciting is that the 2009 edition takes place as jazz is arguably resuming a prominent place in our own popular culture. Veteran and up-and-coming artists alike continue to blend jazz tradition with other musical styles and push the music into new places, attracting new (and younger) listeners along the way. There is no shortage of such artists onhand this year. I plan to catch as many of them as I can, and I expect that Organissimo, Aaron Parks, Time Garland, Jake Shimabukuro, Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, and Eastman School's own Dave Rivello Ensemble will all fit this bill. I'm very excited about all of the above, but I'm even more excited about the many, many groups on the schedule that I've never even heard of, sitting there just waiting to be discovered.