lies like truth

It’s easy — and lazy — to think that all of the cultural stuff worth mentioning in Colorado takes place in Denver and nearby Boulder.

Certainly, I’ve been running around these cities over the past couple of overly busy and therefore sadly blogless weeks experiencing arts happenings as diverse as Eve Ensler’s Body of Work, Wonderbound’s A Gothic Folktale, The Catamounts’ Failure a Love Story, the Beyond Blue exhibition of 25 years of Denver public art, The Narrators’ monthly storytelling session and so on and so on and so on.

Biggest surprise of all, though: Colorado Springs. There’s more to that city’s cultural offerings than fundamentalist christian rock concerts and military parades.

The symphony orchestra and Theatreworks theatre company are among two organizations that produce quality work. And last week, when I visited Colorado Springs for an evening, I was very much taken with the Ivywild School.

Ivywild School is an old elementary school in an otherwise suburban part of town that was recently turned into a cultural hotspot. The imposing brick building now hosts art classes and workshops, live music events and many purveyors of artisanal foods and drinks. Where once there were classrooms and a gym, there’s now a brewery, an upscale greengrocer and more cheese, baked goods and cured meat sellers than you can throw blackboard chalk at.

At midnight on a Wednesday, the place was still hopping. I can’t think of a similar place in Denver, or in San Francisco for that mat

I won’t be surprised if Denver- and Boulder-ites start choosing to spend their evenings in Colorado Springs rather than staying closer to home.

I had two more first time arts experiences this weekend that reminded me of my arts-going life in the Bay Area. One might question the validity of my comparison-making on the basis of an inaugural visit, but I think there’s also a case to be made to share initial thoughts. My impressions will no doubt evolve as I get to know these organizations better.

On Saturday, I made my inaugural visit to the University of Colorado’s Denver’s Newman Center for the Arts. In as much as Newman Center Presents is a university-based presenting organization, it reminds me of my beloved Cal Performances at UC Berkeley. Same high-grade level of talent. Same clientele. Berkeley might have the greater prestige as far as academic presenters go, but  Newman Center Presents has by far the more lovely hall.

Chris Thile performed before a sold-out house. The roughly thousand-seat auditorium is a jewel box with clean lines, understated references to Art Deco in the proscenium arch and lighting fixtures, and a warm sound. Thile played an endearing and engrossing nearly-two-hour-set which veered with its own strange internal logic between J S Bach and winsome self-composed songs about the advantages of dating mandolinists. (They may play too many notes, but you want to take them home with you anyway.) Dressed in a slightly ill-fitting 60s-style suit, Thile was solo on stage the whole time — just him, a stool with a glass of water on it and a small rug around which he occasionally paced. And the room felt very intimate, despite its generous size. I expect Thile’s performance will stay with me for a long time hence.

A second comparison point this weekend: The Curious Theatre. I paid my first visit there to see the company’s production of Amy Herzog’s After the Revolution. Curious focuses on staging contemporary plays, many of them local premieres, in a polished manner. I couldn’t help but draw comparisons between this company and two I spent a lot of time with over the years in The Bay Area — The Magic Theatre and SF Playhouse. The Magic focuses on more world premieres, but the earnestness of the work is on a par with Curious. SF Playhouse and Curious share a similar aesthetic in terms of the kinds of plays that the companies are interested in and a passion for stage design. All three companies hire great actors.

I found it hard to relate to Herzog’s play, a domestic drama about Marxist politics set in 1999. The characters seemed to be mouthpieces for ideology rather than full-blown people that I cared about. And I just couldn’t quite get into the story, despite the fluidity of Herzog’s writing and producing artistic director Chip Walton’s compact mise-en-scene. I love Curious’ digs though. It feels spacious and cozy at the same time.

All this is to say that I’m looking forward to returning to The Curious Theatre and The Newman Center many many times.

 

 

If I have to listen to another person in this city apologize for the cultural paucity of “this dusty old cow town” and claim that Denver’s art scene is “worthless compared with London/San Francisco/New York/Paris/Los Angeles etc” I think I am going to lose my mind.

There’s enough interesting stuff going on  to keep people of all kinds of cultural tastes – from the arch conservative to the uber experimental — occupied many times over every night of the week.

And like any other city with a vibrant arts scene, the ratio of ill-conceived to inspired work is roughly the same wherever you go. It’s not that art in New York is “better” than other places necessarily, it’s just that there’s more of it and it has a greater reputation globally so it attracts more eyeballs and national/international attention from the artistic community and the public at large.

In order for Denver to attract more attention, the first thing that needs to happen is for the city’s arts people to stop apologizing for themselves.

Here are some of the interesting cultural happenings I’ve experienced here (and in nearby Boulder) over the past week or so:

– The baritone clarinet-led experimental jazz outfit, Unfold Ordinary Mind, at Dazzle. I agree with band leader Ben Goldberg: the baritone clarinet is indeed “the king of instruments.”

– Creede theatre company’s Denver tour of “Around the World in 80 Days”. It blows my mind that the tiny, isolated mountain town of Creede has such a creative theatre company run by two such hip young chicks.

– The Boulder International Fringe Festival. Highlights included random ecstatic dance sessions and dynamite Chicago-based performer Kelsie Huff’s “Bruiser.”

– Denver School of the Arts’ production of “Beauty and the Beast.” This public high school put on a production of Disney’s musical version of the fairytale complete with massive, pristinely staged and costumed, full-on production numbers. There must have been 150 kids on stage for “Be My Guest” all moving and dancing and singing at once.

– St Martin’s Chamber Choir “Conductor’s Choice” concert. A conservative group with a beautiful sound and a passion for music by famous international composers as well as contemporary local ones.

– Underground Music Showcase  party at the Museum of Outdoor Arts. Denver’s premiere indie music organization featured a fantastic New Order cover band amid one of Denver’s most eclectic contemporary art institutions. I’m going to be spending more time in Englewood.

– Armitage Gone! Dance’s “Fables on Global Warming” at CU Boulder’s Macky Auditorium. The revered, New York-based company’s playful approach to looking at ancient tales through an environmental lens seems like the perfect prism through which to teach children to take good care of our planet.

OK. That’s about it for now. Off to Curious Theatre tonight.

 

 

I’ve been so busy, that I haven’t managed to put down a thing in writing about some of the cultural activities that I’ve been up in and around Denver in a week. And as I look back over the last seven days, it looks like it’s been a week of “first time” experiences for me.

1. Frightened Rabbit, Local Natives and The National at Red Rocks: My first Red Rocks concert experience. By the light of a full September moon. The sound for Frightened Rabbit (the band I most wanted to see) was terrible. But otherwise a grand experience. I wonder if Red Rocks might consider improving its concessions?

2. Dr Richard Kogan‘s lecture about George Gershwin at The CU Denver Anchutz Medical campus: I did my first live interview for CPR Classical with psychiatrist-musician Richard Kogan, a New York-based, Harvard-educated medic and Juilliard-trained pianist. And then I got to hear Kogan’s full presentation that evening. Impressed by how young the audience was and by Kogan’s brimful brilliant-poignant way of connecting Gershwin’s music with his feverish mind.

3. Oh Heck Yeah launch party at The Spire: Brian Corrigan is a young, artsy fellow about town who’s getting quite a bit of grant money and a growing amount of of public attention around this town for coming up with “Oh Heck Yeah” — an interactive arcade in downtown Denver scheduled for next Summer. The idea is to engage passersby with video games, installations and other interesting digital technology-meets-art fare. The launch, at the top of one of Denver’s luxury high-rise apartment buildings, attracted a crowd of Denver arts mavens. There’s a Kickstarter campaign afoot. I remain curious to see how things evolve.

4. Denver Digerati Flash Friday: Ivar Zeile, the owner of Plus Gallery, runs a monthly outdoor “salon” throughout the summer showcasing a group of interesting video and sound pieces. I caught the final show of the 2013 season. The artworks, by local, national and international artists, are projected on a giant billboard in downtown Denver. The photo at the top was snapped in the middle of an installation called “The Boot”, by Denver artist Justin Beard. The installations on Friday were all very different.

5. Third Friday on Santa Fe: The First Friday Art Walk in Denver’s Santa Fe arts district is much about the partying at this point. So people who are actually interested in viewing art and talking to artists and curators have taken to walking around the district on the third friday of each month, when the scene is more subdued and “grown up.” Many of the galleries were open on Friday and quite busy. But the mood was mellow. I wonder if Third Friday will end up being like First Friday? And if so, what that will mean for Denver’s burgeoning gallery scene?

6. Create Denver Expo: This past week, the city of Denver has focused on entrepreneurism. Lots of tech-focused conferences etc. There was of course a nod to the arts. I attended the first part of the all-day cultural industries-focused symposium organized by Denver Arts & Venues. Colleen Keegan from Creative Capital gave a rousing keynote speech in front of around 200 people at The McNichols Building and then there were breakout sessions. Her words, as well as the session I attended by business consultant Bob Blenn reminded me that I need to sit down and devote some time to the ol’ strategic planning process. With all the upside-down turning of my life in recent months, thinking about this stuff has gotten buried. A good reminder to bring it back front and center of my life.

7. Curious Theatre’s production of John Logan’s Red at The Denver Art Museum: In conjunction with DAM’s Mark Rothko exhibition, the museum invited Denver’s premiere contemporary theatre company to re-stage its production of Logan’s play about the artist from last season. It was my first experience of Curious Theatre’s work. DAM is excellent at seeking out canny partnerships. The company reassembled the crack original cast — Lawrence Hecht as Rothko, and Benjamin Bonenfant as the artist’s long-suffering assistant Ken — for this weekend remount.

8. The Austin Lounge Lizards at Swallow Hill Music: I am so thrilled to live in a town that has such a lively roots music scene.  The epicenter of the scene is Swallow Hill. Swallow Hill is the second biggest organization devoted to the folk world after the Old Town in Chicago. I picked an Austin Lounge Lizards concert to make my first trip out to the bright and warm space in South Denver. The group was in fine fettle. I am looking forward to attending more events there and maybe even taking some music classes. I think many artists can learn from the Lizards’ way of being deadly serious at the same time as being very funny.

9. In A World at Chez Artiste: My first movie theater experience since moving here. A funny, sweet and thought-provoking film by the amazing young filmmaker Lake Bell. It’s a feature film about voice, focusing on the life of an up-and-coming voice-over artist in Hollywood. As someone who’s obsessed with voice, I am deeply moved by Bell’s critique of the high-pitched, constrained, bland way in which many young, American women speak today (“you sound like a squeaky toy” / “you sound like a sexy baby”) and her advocacy of women owning the way they speak.

Phew.

Perhaps it’s something about being in a new city, or maybe Denver is just a place where amazing cultural surprises lurk around every corner. But I feel like my days here have been full of unexpected, delightful encounters with art. The latest two instances of this that I’d like to report on in brief are as follows:

1) The Red Rocks Amphitheatre, one of the world’s great outdoor performance venues, is transformed by day into a hangout for tourists and a parcours for athletes. When I was out there late morning a few days ago with some friends visiting from California, we sat at the top of the stadium seating admiring the epic view of the crimson geology and the big skies while people in spandex ran and jumped around the bleachers around us. Down on the stage though, where others were milling about, imagining what it must be like to be Phish or The Dead or any of the other countless super bands that have played some of their most memorable gigs from this awe-inspiring Colorado stage cloven into the rocks, a young bagppiper warmed up his instrument and played “Amazing Brace” and other well-known piping songs. His warm sound consumed the space. The crowd cheered. We went down to the stage during his performance to listen more closely. And then I went up to him to chat. Turns out the piper was a fellow Brit, visiting his family with his pipes to perform at a memorial service for a recently deceased relative. He had come to Red Rocks the previous day to look around and made a point, as soon as he saw the stage, to return the next morning with his pipes. Playing the bagpipes at altitude in such dry and hot weather isn’t easy. But the musician made a lovely warm sound and I felt elated to have gotten the chance to hear Red Rocks’ famously good acoustics without the need of amplification. I’m looking forward to returning there in a few weeks for The National/Frightened Rabbit and for a screening of Under A Blood Red Sky.

2) I didn’t intend to spend yesterday evening watching a production of Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner. I had, instead, planned on hitting the First Friday Art Walk in the RINO district and possibly having dinner with friends at Fuel. But sometimes evenings take surprising and wonderful turns and you just have to go with them. It started with a happy hour drink and chat with Andrea Dupree and Michael Henry, the founders of The Lighthosue Writers Workshop, Denver’s most illustrious center dedicated to the literary arts. After chatting for a while about the local scene at Pinches Tacos, Andrea and Michael invited me to the Lighthouse Writers Workshop building, an amazing old Victorian house full of nooks and crannies and yet surprising bright and airy, to check out “a short play” that some local theatre people and Lighthouse entouragers were putting on up in one of the building’s attic rooms. The “short play” ended up being an intense and brilliant two and a half hours of Shawn performed by the members of The Denver Poets’ Theatre. The three actors (one of whom, John Cotter, also directed the production) performed Shawn’s erudite and talky drama about the increasingly strained relationship between a son-in-law, his wife, and her father more or less sitting at one end of a long writing table in the attic room. The ten or so members of the audience sat around the table, a few feet away from the actors. The players had put the production together over the course of a year, sitting over bottles of wine once or twice a week. The lengthy process led them to understand Shawn’s worldview deeply. Even in such a small space, the intimacy was rarely overpowered by a feeling that we were watching acting at work. It felt more like we were being drawn into a conversation — one mostly going on in the head of the play’s unavoidably likable but troubled antihero, Jack (Aaron Angello.) After the show was over, the audience and cast chatted in the attic for an hour or so. I had long missed First Friday and Fuel. But the art walk happens every month. And the restaurant is open every day. What I got to participate in seemed quite unique.

A question raised from the evening I spent with the Colorado Ballet.

The Denver-based company performed a mixed program last night at the Arvada Center Outdoor Amphitheater, which swung between classical pas de deux from Gisele and Don Quixote, and contemporary ballet pieces, including a setting for two dancers of Adele’s “Fire to the Rain” by choreographer Sandra Brown and a tango-infused triptych choreographed by Lorita Travaglia to music by Astor Piazzolla.

As I watched the performance, it struck me that ballet companies as a whole are unusual among arts institutions for continuing to revive very old choreography.

Conversely, outside of places like Russia, it’s rare to see an opera or a production of a play or musical that uses the blocking and acting style of more than a hundred years ago. Imagine watching a re-staging of a Shakespeare production by Herbert Beerbohm Tree today? Though perhaps interesting from an academic perspective, such an endeavor would appear pretty silly and anachronistic to most contemporary audiences.

Just as often as someone like Mark Morris will come along and create entirely new choreography around The Nutcracker, companies continue rehash the old Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov steps from the 19th century. The Colorado Ballet certainly isn’t alone in resurrecting moves by long dead choreographers like  Petipa (Don Quixote), Jean Coralli & Jules Perrot (Gisele).

Why do ballet companies continue to pay homage to old fashioned dance steps in such an explicit way?

 

The Clyfford Still Museum in Denver is developing unusual ways to engage its community — ways that stretch the subject matter of the institution as a center devoted to the life and work of a single artist — in somewhat far-fetched but nevertheless lively directions.

For instance, last night, the museum invited members to a baseball game at Coors Field. The reason? Still was a big baseball fan. The photo hear is of the artist attending a game. The museum also has a baseball mitt owned by Still in its collection.

I attended the game, a bout between the Colorado Rockies and the San Francisco Giants. The Museum party consisted of around 30 people. I chatted with a few of the Museum’s members at a pre-game reception held at a nearby bar. A love of the artist and of the game drew them out, though as platters of nachos and quesadillas came and went, the talk only occasionally touched on Still and/or baseball.

The mood was high. An older chap with a fine art background, William, even managed to make off with a baseball which fell into his lap somewhere around the top of the fourth inning. When asked by an envious onlooker whether he’d ever sell his prize, William replied that the item would never appear on eBay.

The event got me thinking about how particularly challenging it can be for organizations to engage audiences when their field of inquiry is so narrow. “ The idea here is to look at programs that makes the Still museum accessible to many audiences,” the museum’s public relation’s consultant, Regan Petersen, explained in an email. “We are exploring many programs that link to Still’s legacy and aiming to share his vision and art with the public.”

Still and baseball is a bit of a stretch, as was the case when the museum hosted a fashion show a few weeks ago. I never really thought of the painter as a fashionista. The rationale, then, for setting up a catwalk? According to Petersen, fashion designer Stephanie O, around whose work the show at the museum was created, sees Still as a great source of inspiration.

On the other hand, Still’s career as an “anything goes” abstract expressionist provides a  kind of license for the institution to make the most of even the most tangential links to Still’s life. After all, beyond the fact that the artist taught for a little while in Boulder and has a nephew living in the region, there’s no truly compelling biographical reason for the museum to exist in Denver at all. And yet I’m so glad it’s here.

I wonder what they’ll think of next? A Clyfford Still knitting circle? Wear Clyfford Still Spectacles Day?

Quite a few of the larger cities in the United Sates have their resident “knitting bombers” — that is, groups of hipsters who love to knit/crochet and spend time adorning various urban landmarks with bits of colorful wool.

But it’s not often the case that such a group will be embraced by major cultural institutions. In Denver, however, the needle wielding divas of the anachronistically-named Ladies Fancywork Society were up bright and early this morning adorning one side of the city’s premiere arts institution, the Denver Art Museum, with an enormous, crocheted garden landscape.

I went by on my bike at around 8am to watch the members of the LSF installing their latest creation as part of the museum’s current multifaceted “Spun” show dedicated to exploring fabric-based arts of all kinds.

The LSF vertical wool garden is made up of assorted patches of green crochet embellished with imaginative flora and fauna, including playfully phallic-looking toadstools. It took four knitters around two months to create the gorgeous piece and the planning extends much further back.

The garden is vividly eye-catching on the museum wall. I love the brilliant colors and cookie-ness of it. I also appreciate the way in which members of the public who attend the museum’s Final Friday event at the end of September will be able to take pieces of the garden, which will be deconstructed after a month or so on view, home for free. Nice.

I am coveting one of those phallic toadstools, myself.

I wonder, though, how the meaning of this kind of work changes when it goes from being the kamikaze creation of a group of underground handicrafters to being appropriated by a major arts institution?

I mean, It’s one thing for an enormous woolly garden to appear out of nowhere on the side of a building in an unregulated way, but quite another when the activity is sanctioned.

So far, the LFS has been involved with DAM in a variety of ways:

In March of 2010, LFS was invited to tag the massive bovine art installation outside the museum (“Scottish Angus Cow and Calf by Dan Ostermiller”.) Here’s a link to a photo of the escapade on the LFS site. And LFS has also done installations to promote “Spun” at locations such as IKEA and the Cherry Creek Mall. Here’s a twitter link to LFS members installing their work at IKEA. 

I’ll be curious to see how the collective’s relationship with the museum evolves. I am in favor of the collaboration, though the promotional work gives me pause for thought. I hope that the LFS will continue to produce work in a more spontaneous way all around the city and beyond and that the museum will continue to do the important work of finding other unusual, locally-based individuals and collectives to work with on thoughtful-delightful projects.

PS If you’re in Denver this Friday night and at a loose end, head to the latest “Untitled” arts soiree at DAM to hear LFS members talking about their process at 6:45pm and lead a public crocheting “knit tag” workshop.

 

It’s been a week of beginnings and endings on the theatre front here in Denver.

On the one hand, I witnessed the start of the national tour of Peter and the Starcatcher, an event which was pretty joyful and made me feel good (for once) about the state of commercial theatre in this country. On the other hand, I experienced the demise of a small theatre company that’s been producing shows in Denver for 40 years. Watching Germinal Stage‘s production of Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience was both poignant and torturous.

First, a few words about Peter. What’s remarkable about Rick Elice’s loose dramatic adaptation of a 2004 prequel to the classic children’s story Peter Pan by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson is that it’s a play. It’s not a musical. I don’t think I can recall the last time that Broadway produced a truly successful tour of a non-musical work that had no name recognition to it. It’s one thing to tour a Pulitzer Prize-winning show with famous actors in it, and quite another to run around the country with a production that has a young ensemble cast and only the slackest of ties to anything that people might recognize (the Peter Pan narrative.)

The show holds its own from start to finish with its inventive use of simple props (yellow rubber kitchen gloves become flapping birds; a ship and ocean waves are represented by lengths of rope…), brilliant comedic acting — perhaps most ostentatiously by John Sanders as the malign and misguided pirate Black Stache — and rhythmic writing that never ceases to tickle the eardrums.

I expect Peter and the Starcatcher will entrance audiences all over the country, as it did in New York and at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego where it launched in 2009. Much of its box office success will probably come from word of mouth and strong reviews owing to the lack of name recognition and the fact that it’s a play rather than a musical.

At the opposite end of the scale, this weekend was the end of the line for the Germinal Stage. The choice of Handke’s obsessive 1966 meta-theatrical treatise on the nature of reality and artifice and life and death served as a fitting swan song for the organization, not only because of the poignant theme but also because the production involved a cast of 43 actors, many of whom seemed to be drawn from the company’s own community of friends and family. Each cast member was wearing a sign around his/her neck with his/her name on it and the year in which the actor first attended or otherwise experienced a Germinal show. Some of the signs had dates going way back to the 1970s and 80s.

It was odd for me, as someone who’s just turned up in Denver and was attending this theatre for the first time, to witness this organization’s finale. The play itself is a bold choice: Handke’s writing is didactic. There is no plot or characters. The actors all wear their street clothes and the house lights are on for almost the whole one hour and fifteen minute showtime. There’s nowhere  to hide and the experience of sitting through the piece, feeling like it’s never going to end, is sort of disconcerting because you also know that when it finally does end, it’s curtains for Germinal Stage. When the lights go off, they will go off forever and no more actors will  tread those boards.

I felt bad for struggling through Handke’s treatise. But that’s just the point. The play, excrutiatingly dull and badly delivered as it is by Germinal’s voluminous, self-conscious cast, is meant to make you feel ill at ease. I left the theatre feeling a curious mixture of ecstatic relief that the play was over and mild sadness that I wouldn’t get the chance  to see more of this company’s work.

Success is fleeting and nothing lasts forever. I leave you with the final lines of Handke’s play, which were delivered by the theatre’s founder and artistic director, Ed Baierlein, whom I hear is retiring. The sale of the auditorium, the director’s nest egg, will help to provide some measure of financial security for his future.

You ladies and gents you,
you celebrities of public and cultural life you,
you who are present you,
you brothers and sisters you,
you comrades you,
you worthy listeners you,
you fellow humans you.
You were welcome here. We thank you.
Good night.

It all began with a public art tour of Denver. I took the tour the weekend before last, thinking it would be a useful thing to do for an arts editor who’s new in town.

The tour guide, Rudi Cerri, is Denver’s Public Art Administrator. As I found out during the course of conversation in between tour stops on our genteel stroll through downtown Denver on a quiet Sunday morning, Rudi is also a trumpeter with Boba Fett and the Americans.

Less than a week later, I found myself playing oboe in a gig with Rudi and his crew. It was one of the most standout cultural adventures of my life to date.

It’s hard to explain what BFATA is and does. The closest I can get is to describe the outfit of assorted musicians — most of them brass players and percussionists — as a kamikaze Star Wars- / star-spangled-banner-themed marching band. The group was founded a few years ago by Shawn King, a multi-instrumentalist member of DeVotchKa,the darling musical ensemble of the indie movie scene. (DeVotchKa scored Little Miss Sunshine among other projects.) According to Rudi, BFATA presents a way for serious musicians like Shawn, who was on tour so not present for last weekend’s gig, to have unbridled fun and make a little musical mischief with no commercial strings attached.

The band’s schtick is to maraud around town dressed in thrift store red, white and blue, and swoop down on mostly unsuspecting music venues, bars, private parties and random public spaces with extremely loud and utterly funky renditions of singable and danceable pop covers like “Push It,” “Tricky” and “Bust a Move.”

The day after the public art tour, Rudi sent me the following email:

If you were serious about coming out for a night and joining in the mayhem that is Boba Fett and the Americans, the rest of the band would be more than happy to welcome you. We don’t play much these days but are set to go out this Saturday, our main hit for the night will be the Ogden Theater,  but we will  be crashing a few more places along the way. If you are free and are interested, let me know and I’ll put you in contact with Joe Grobelny, our “manager”, and amazing trombone player on the details for the evening. The band is all about having fun and making people happy.  If you do come out, wear something, red, white, and blue.

How could I say no to that?

We pitched up at the studio of visual artist Patrick Marold, where the band habitually rehearses, at around 7.30pm. I was wearing a red, white and blue dress that I hardly ever have occasion to wear but that was perfect for the occasion. I had a white felt fedora on my head and white cowboy boots on my feet. With the addition of the oboe, I probably looked entirely silly. Rudi had run some City of Denver art-making workshop that day and was wearing pants and a t-shirt that had been customized with various stars and stripes in regulation colors by someone at his workshop.

Around 10 musicians gradually assembled, dressed in various bits of star-spangled hilarity and wielding sousaphones, saxophones, trumpets, trombones and drums. The leader of the band, a mild-mannered chap named Ethan, rapped song lyrics and other stuff into a megaphone and wore a red super hero costume complete with cape and Boba Fett mask. I hear that the cape gets occasional solos when the group goes out gigging.

The sound of the band is ear-splitting but euphoric. I couldn’t hear a single note I was playing on my puny oboe. I was no match for the percussion and brass. But I was in a state of ecstasy improvising along with hits like “Billie Jean”. Oboists rarely have so much fun.

When we finally left Patrick’s studio in a convoy of cars (the band’s van was out of commission) things got more interesting. We started off the night at around nine-ish crashing a massive rock gig at The Ogden Theater, a venue with a capacity of 1,500 and which was packed. We ran in for about 10 minutes while the roadies were changing the stage between appearances by the  the groups Hearts of Palm and Yellow Second, and played a bunch of songs.

The crowd was dancing and whooping centimeters from my face. I had been told to “look after my horn” by several band members before we went out. I realized that they weren’t joking about the rowdiness levels and wished that I had a plastic oboe to use on these kinds of occasions, instead of my precious Howarth. I was a little scared for my instrument as we were doing our stuff right in the middle of the mosh pit. It was brilliant. And then suddenly we were done and dashed out as fast as we had dashed in. It was like a musical hit and run.

The next stop, at around 10.30 was a 30th birthday party at Dazzle, Denver’s premiere jazz club. Again, a very appreciative crowd. After we played our short set and were chilling outside the venue, someone came out and asked us if “we accepted small tips.” The guys gave us a hundred dollar bill.

After that, we sped over to The Highlands and played some songs for people hanging out at the Forest Room 5 bar. The bar was super busy and happy. I played the oboe from a wooden perch a few feet above the rest of the crowd. I felt like a songbird in a branch, even though no one could hear a thing I was playing.

At around midnight, we pitched up at the Little Man ice-cream parlor and played a random bunch of tunes for the people in the long line awaiting treats at the Denver frozen dessert icon. There were a bunch of cops waiting in line too at the time. They didn’t seem too thrilled at the amount of hubbub we were creating. We must have broken all kinds of noise ordinance laws. But they let us play anyway. And the people loved it. They danced and sang along and said thank you afterwards.

The night culminated with us blowing our entire $100 tip on ice cream. It was the perfect end to a perfect evening. I hope BFATA will have me back. Shouldn’t every marching band include an oboe?