Colorado's First Gypsy Jazz Festival!

Archtop Eddy

Hi all. There's some good news for us here in the mile-high state.

Various Colorado Rocky Mountain Front Range Gypsy jazz bands are getting together at the first-ever Colorado Gypsy jazz festival -- the Longmont Swing Festival, Saturday Aug 13, Roosevelt Park Pavilion, Longmont Colorado. The event is from noon to 8 p.m.; open and free to the public. There will be a "group" jam at the end of the evening and plenty of chances to meet and play with the various pickers in the Colorado area.

Scheduled to play are Dan Tulenko, David Williams and Deco Django, Blue Horizon, the Hot Club of Boulder, and Mango fan Django.

Special thanks goes out to Barron of the Hot Club of Boulder for doing all the hard work to present this event. I am truly hoping that this will be the beginning of much good-collective Gypsy jazz things on the front range.

A.E.

bbeshoar

The first Longmont Swing Festival took place August 13, 2005 in the Roosevelt Park Pavilion, an outdoor venue that serves as an ice rink in winter. The event was an unqualified success for both performers and audience members.

Longmont is in Boulder County. We have a remarkable number of swing players in the area. The festival featured four artists from the county--3 gypsy quartets and a musette accordianist, plus Mango fan Django from Colorado Springs, a hundred-some miles to the south. We all had a glorius day. We all played well. Everything went smoothly and pretty much as planned. Old folks cut a rug for us, and young ones too. We made friends and fans in the community. Mango fan Django surpassed our already high expectations and filled the pavilion with dancing couples.

The weather could have been more favorable (the high was 59!), but we drew an audience in spite of the cold and rain, and some of them were here from start to finish. Among those hardy souls was Richard Showers who, as he listened to us play, wrote page after page in a notebook. He gave one of those pages to me. Here's what he had to say:

"There is something almost naughty about Gypsy Jazz. It evokes the primal. There is the foot tapping high energy sound that requires a strict discipline to remain seated, but then again, why stay seated? Get up and move!

Then there is the off-key "Minor Blues" melody that would inspire writers on the left bank of Paris to put words on paper of sultry hot nights where sense and sensibility are abandoned for passion of an animal kind.

Longmont's Swing Festival, though meager in attendance for its first year, won the hearts of us there. People so inspired by the music, they hoped to capture the dazzle through the lens of their cameras, but alas, no flat photo will compare to the music that filled the air."

I'd like to thank the City of Longmont Community & Neighborhoods Resources for the grant that made this event possible, and all those city employees who helped shepherd me through the grant and permit process. This was government at its best, helping citizens do good things for the community. Thanks are also due to Todd's Guitars Etc., Abbondanza Pizza, and Xtra Productions for helping defray some of the costs.

Most importantly, I want to thank my fellow musicians who volunteered their time for this event--Dan Tulenko, Deco Django, Blue Horizon, Mango fan Django, my bandmates in Hot Club of Boulder, and all those who came to hear us. This was a real community event in which the Colorado gypsy jazz community came together as brothers and sisters united in a cause, to raise the profile of the music we love, to share that music with each other and an appreciative audience. Putting it together, and playing it, was a once in lifetime experience.

Photos at http://www.hotclubofboulder.com/Swingfest.html

Barron B. Beshoar
Hot Club of Boulder
Longmont Swing Festival
www.hotclubofboulder.com