As I write this month’s column, Anne and I are in Scotland, performing at the Kirkcudbright (pronounced “Kir-coo-bree”) Jazz Festival (pronounced “Jazz” “Fes-ti-val”). It’s a beautiful seaside town in the south of Scotland bisected by the River Dee opening up to Kirkcudbright Bay, which in turn leads out to the Solway Firth. The festival itself has four venues, two of them being in the Parish Church and the Parish Church Hall across the street. The Scots are so hip! Although neither church-affiliated venue can sell alcohol, both will provide glasses so you can BYOB! Find that in the states! While it’s a terrific weekend—great music, even better people, fantastic whisky—our seven-week tour of the UK is wrapping up. One more session on Wednesday at the prestigious Concorde Club in Eastleigh (a venue south of London presenting jazz for 60 years; the list of who hasn’t performed there is shorter than the list of who has) and we’re homeward bound.
So of course I’m thinking about what’s coming up back in the US. I’m looking forward to performing at two delightful festivals that couldn’t be farther apart in location or ambience, but that both deliver the best music around! First up is the Evergreen Jazz Festival (Evergreen, CO July 26-28), where in addition to playing with Hal Smith’s El Dorado Jazz Band I’ll be teaching clinics, lecturing on the preponderance of pianists who make up the pantheon of composers in both the Jazz and Great American Songbook arenas, and duetting with superstars Sonny Leyland and Brian Holland.
The following weekend will find me once again with the El Dorado band at the Bix Festival in Davenport, IA (August 1-3) as well as guesting with several outfits run by T.J. Müller and Matt Tolentino. The Bix Fest has been around for over 50 years and has morphed (really, adapted) to fit the changing times and budget while staying true to the message of celebrating the music and the era of Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke. It’s this latter festival I’ll focus on this month.
My topic is a last minute one, arising when I saw a photo on the online version of this publication of the Natural Gas Jazz Band performing at the Bix Festival in LeClaire Park in 1988 to what looks like 10,000+ people!
The first occasion for me to play at this esteemed multi-venue event was in the mid-1990’s with the CT-based septet the Hot Cat Jazz Band. We were the new kids on the block and so had fastidiously prepared not just the golden Bixian standards (“Singing the Blues,” “Davenport Blues”) but also comparative rarities such as “Goose Pimples” and “Blue River.” We only appeared once at the festival. It’s not that we weren’t well-received; there were complaints that our sets were too short. We had the bad luck of following Ralph Norton’s Varsity Ramblers for every one of our sets. Not that the Ramblers were hard to listen to; they were terrific. But we soon realized that Norton (who performed under the soubriquet “Little Bix”) probably didn’t get much work; he turned his allotted forty-five minutes into sixty every time! That left us with the uncomfortable choice of playing our full forty-five minutes or cutting our set down to thirty so as not to disrespect the band following us. After some heated discussion, we chose to play the shorter set time and that was that!
Dickens could well have been at the festival that year with us. In the “best of times” category, we were honored to have the trombonist Newell “Spiegle” Willcox (see TST October 2018) sit in with us for a couple of sets. In the “worst of times” category, one of those sets was in LeClaire Park.
Now, upon arrival we were being told how lucky we were (especially as a new band) to be scheduled to play this premier venue. The LeClaire Bandshell along the banks of the Mississippi River was THE place to perform. “Thousands upon thousands of people spread out in the park with their lawn chairs and on blankets, while the paying festival attendees have their choice of a thousand seats right in front of the bandshell, the stage of which is ten feet above the ground,” we had been told by rabid enthusiasts. Great!! This will be our chance to “strut our stuff!”
What our well-wishers failed to share with us is that the experience they were describing depended on both the weather and the time of one’s set. We were scheduled to play at 2 pm on a day that reached 102 degrees in the shade!! We arrived to set up and looked out at nearly a thousand empty chairs and a vast mown field of…nothing…no picnickers, no lawn chairs, not even a cow. Summer days in Iowa can be brutal and this one hit a heat index record.
Not to say there was no-one at all there that day. Take a close look at the photo of the Natural Gas Jazz Band on this page. First, notice how comfortable they look; it looks to have been a moderate day with a bit of cloud cover. Next, notice the tall tree in the distance? We did have about 50 people listening to us all crowded under that tree for shade. What that meant was that every time we finished a tune, we’d squint to see the audience applauding and after 3-4 seconds of silence get to hear the smattering of hand-claps. It was truly surreal!
My hands kept sliding off the keys; John Banker’s hands were so sweaty he could barely hold onto his tuba. Noel Kaletsky had shimmied out of his suspenders, taken off his white dress shirt and was playing in his sleeveless t-shirt. The bandshell offered its own “air-fryer” effect and we were soon to be the “Burnt Cat” jazz band, not as in “sunburned” but as in “to a crisp.” The topper was the local PBS station was recording this set and still annually shows it leading up to the festival. Every year I’m there, I hear “Boy, you guys almost died, didn’t you?” and “Shoulda played some cool jazz! Snark, snark!!”
OK, I’ve described “the worst of times” aspect. The “best of times” was that it was this infernal inferno of a set where we were joined by Spiegle Willcox. He came onstage after our opening number, ramrod straight, dressed in smart slacks, Oxford shirt and tie and a double-breasted blue jacket. He took the time to shake hands with everyone in the band, smile and say how happy he was to be joining us, sat on the tall stool provided for him, played, sang, smiled, told stories, and never once even thought about removing his jacket or even loosening his collar.
The man was in his 90s and was completely unaffected by the heat, by the quarter-mile distance between us and the closest audience member, by anything. He played as if he were in an air-conditioned ballroom in front of thousands of listeners and dancers. With each tune and story, he looked stronger and younger. It was a marvel to see and a memory to which I still return when conditions are less than optimal on a gig. Spiegle’s strength of spirit, his joy of people and of life, his gratitude for the gifts he’d been given to share with the world for so long: all of these carried the day.
Am I jealous of a band having a crowd at LeClaire Park like the one you see in the photo? A little… By now, I’ve had a few occasions to play both indoors and out for crowds that big, and honestly smaller venues where you can interact and see the reaction of each person in the audience can be far more rewarding to play. The good thing is the Bix Festival is now in one air-conditioned venue with plenty of comfortable seating, two good dance floors and plenty of indoor food options a few steps away from the ballroom. The bands parade through and you just get to sit there and let them do all the moving. It’s one of the only festivals I play that I sit in the venue listening to other bands when I’m not onstage. They (and the venue) are that good!
Begone, LeClaire Bandshell Oven! Long live Spiegle Willcox! Long live Bix, Evergreen, Kirkudbright and the remaining surviving jazz events! Long live ALL of us so we can continue to share some great music and times together!
Stay cool.
