Sunday (coda)
Jazz.

Not the Utah variety.
The New Orleans variety.

And, for the record: I know that the Utah Jazz were the New Orleans Jazz before the move.
That doesn’t change the fact that they are still not what I’m talking about.

Jazz music is what I’m talking about here.
Dixieland jazz.

Brass. Banjo. Drum. Bass. And a piano.
Even more specifically: The Preservation Hall Jazz Band. To borrow a quote from Drumline: “One band, one sound.” In this case, it was: Seven men. Seven instrumnents. One mood.

And the mood was: Fun.

Not only did they come to Salt Lake and play up a storm, they redeemed the 2007 Utah Arts Festival. At least, they redeemed it for me. They played their brand of music and lit up the place. There were people dancing in front of the stage. Around/among the crowd. And, when they did their “Second Line” piece, Joe Avery, they led a line of people through the performance area and up on the stage. They turned a performance into an interactive experience. And it was wonderful. You could tell that the band was having a good time. You see it. You could hear it. You could feel it. And, looking around the crowd, you could tell that the people were having just as good a time. In fact, I think that my three bellwethers were:

  • A little girl – she couldn’t have been more than three – who walked past me with her family. She danced as she walked by… no prodding from her parents, no insistence from anyone. She just… danced. And she was into it, too.
  • A young lady who danced past me in the Second Line. She was dancing in the moment. You could see it in the look on her face and the way that she moved as the line snaked through the crowd. The mood and the spirit seemed to be infectious to her; she seemed powerless to resist it. And, quite frankly, she seemed very happy and willing to give in to it.
  • An older gentleman (in his… late 60s/early70s, maybe) who, at one point, was dancing near the stage… and then decided to let the music move him around the crowd. Not too far from me, he put his drink down and seriously got his dance on. A few moments later, he returned to his cup, picked it up and grooved his way through the rest of the crowd.

I think that I’ve loved hearing the saxophone in jazz since I could pronounce the word “saxophone.” A low, moaning sax can tell you about heartbreak and pain. A high, wailing sax can make you fly. And it can hit just about every emotion in between. Tonight, however, I was forced to reconsider its position in the instrumental pantheon. Don’t get me wrong, Darryl Adams did it right. He was all over it: High. Low. Running the scales. He was on. But… Lucien Barbarin (I think it was him, I didn’t get a good look at him… and I know that it wasn’t Frank Demond) turned it out… on the trombone. That’s right: The trombone. And it was gooood. This isn’t to say that the other instruments didn’t swing, too. They did. Mightily. But, these two… *nod*… they had the stuff tonight.

So, while the Kimball Arts Festival still holds a little more appeal to me, tonight restored my faith in the Utah Arts Festival.

Namaste.