- Thursday - Jazz Pub Crawl (we did not attend, but heard it was great!)
- Friday - Irv Williams and Allen Touissant... we skipped Allen and went to the Hat trick and saw the Jack Brass Band - transported us back to New Orleans for a moment
- Saturday - Started with New Standards (Chan Poling from the Suburbs, John Munson from Trip Shakespeare and some dude on the Vibraphones), took a break and went to Barrio for a drink, came back for Alex Han with Jon Weber - Alex is an amazing 20ish sax player, and got front row chairs for the headliner Esperanza Spalding - Esperanza is a 23 year old woman from Oregon, who is formally trained on string instruments, but has taken that training and turned it into amazing jazz. She plays double bass (stand up bass) like she's (ahem) dancing/making love to it, she plays bass guitar like an old school rocker, adn has an amaizing voice - both in range and capability. Every single straight male in the audience was wondering how they could get access to her. She is one of the shining stars of jazz that we saw this weekend.
- Sunday -aside from sleeping late, celebrating Fathers day with good food and bubbly, we ended the evening at the Dakota... witnessing another young, female rising star - Uehara Hiromi.... a pianist who is indescribably talented at translating her vision of music through her nimble fingers onto 4 seperate key boards. Amazing to watch, and even if you could just hear her... still phenominal.
My long winded (as usual) point is that these two women are rising in Jazz - at a record pace - they represent the future of jazz, and while I've seen plenty of talented young men - I've never seen one who can capture the hearts and minds of her audience the way both Esperanza and Hiromi do... keep your eyes open... these chicks will be the powerhouse of jazz for the next 15 years... move over Diana Krall - you have company on the stage!
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