Happy Landings: The 2024 Roswell Jazz Fest

In late October I attended for the first time the Roswell Jazz Festival in Roswell, NM. I tied it in with my plans to attend the Arizona Classic Jazz Festival a week later. I added visits to four national parks in Texas and New Mexico around the two festivals, in keeping with my desire to have more than one reason for flying most or all the way across the country. Until I happened to check Roswell’s website a week before the event (and the day before I left home) I did not know that there were free music sets in a city park in the afternoons. I had signed up for an all-events ticket but received no information about the “extras” before leaving. This festival is more accurately described as a party, as there are no organized bands, only individual musicians who are put together in various combinations during the weekend. Other festivals follow this format. There were 32 invited performers and 55 sets in all, including the free ones, thereby producing an almost infinite number of possible musical combinations. A few of the sets overlapped, to my dismay, so it was not possible to take in everything. Some of the sets were at paid events that included an unstated obligation to buy food and/or drinks at additional cost. One was at a coffee house, two at a winery, and one at a restaurant. I signed up for all of them, figuring that since I had to eat anyway, why not consume some musi