"Summertime" slowly drawing to a close

And it seemed like we barely had a summer this year, meteorologically speaking. But we had some hot jazz!

The Jazz Workshop met at McRae Park for the third-to-the-last Monday evening jazz workshop of this year. The sun was down before we were done tonight. Sigh. We'll meet again on 8/24 and 8/31, but Labor Day is coming quickly and the Workshop will switch back to Saturdays from 12:00-4:00 starting September 12.

Tonight we had a fairly compact turnout with Sam (bass and trumpet), Annie (vocals), Margo (bass), Trent (the first-ever jazz bassoonist at the Workshop), Wes (tenor sax), Dick (vocals), Ira (alto sax), John (vocals), Tim (guitar), Gene (drums) and Matt (flute). That's still 11 people, though! We ended up with different instrumentation than usual which has the effect of making people play differently, always an interesting experiment.

We started with about an hour of instrumentals and then the vocalists joined us until the end. We covered various tunes including "Summertime," "A Night in Tunisia" (which elicited an inadvertent Jerry Garcia tribute from the guitarist) "From Here to Eternity," "I Thought About You," "Jeannine," "St. Thomas," "Just Friends," "Four" and several others which I cannot now recall.

Anyway, that was tonight. We'll be back next week on 8/24 and again on 8/31, and then that'll be a wrap for the Workshop on Monday evenings.