Jazz Concert

This will be the condensed version, because I am tired of writing about the Jazz Concert. I already wrote a long version, which took me about an hour, but it was erased for some reason when I tried to post it.

So I went to the Yokosuka Arts Theater for the ‘Yokosuka Jazz Dreams 2005’ concert two Saturday s ago (July 30) and saw a great show. There were three acts. The first featured Salena Jones, the jazz singer, with a Japanese backup band. She was phenomenal. They played and sang a lot of classic songs, but not since the show was a week and a half ago, I can’t name any titles off the top of my head.

The second group, I didn’t like so much. The started out playing some really cool, smooth jazz, but then broke into this weird experimental, fusion crap. It was supposed to be a blend of traditional Japanese music and jazz, but it sounded like a truckload of cats being skinned alive on large stringed instruments. Yes, it was that bad. I have nothing against traditional Japanese music, and I have heard some really good fusion between it and western music, but this was not one of them.

The third and last group, however, was, in my opinion, the best. They had some really cool smooth jazz all the way through, with very few limited outbursts of ‘fusion’. This was a group (sorry I don’t know they’re name off the top of my head) that made you want to snap your fingers like a hip beatnik and say ‘yeah, daddy. I dig it!’

Ms. Abe, the director of the International Relations Division at city hall, gave me two tickets to the show. Maiko couldn’t come because her brother was leaving the country for a year the next day, so they had a family dinner she had to go to, and I couldn’t find anyone around here that was free that night. I went alone, but I felt bad about taking both of the tickets and only using one, so I went to the ticket booth to see if I could return one so someone else could use it. There was a single little old lady buying a ticket at the moment I arrived there, so I asked her if she would care to join me. I hope Maiko wasn’t too jealous that I had a date with this woman (who must have been in her 70s at least)! The woman was very polite and even bought me a sandwich during the intermission. To top it off, the woman sitting on the other side of the old woman struck up a conversation with me afterwards, and when I mentioned how much I loved Korean food (all my conversations here eventually revolve around food), she told me she was Korean and offered to take me to dinner at a Korean BBQ restaurant across the street.

A free jazz concert, sandwich, and Korean BBQ all in one night – I must be doing something right somewhere! I was a little bummed about going by myself that night, but things turned out pretty well anyway.