Another way to get high on jazz...

I recently had the opportunity to get to know a gentleman who serves, along with my wife and several other individuals, on the board of a certain internationally flavored social group in our community here in north Alabama. It was at a social event just for board members and spouses. It was there that he learned of my interest in jazz and promised to give me a tape of a jazz concert that he was involved in some years back. It took place on a KLM jet making its way to Amsterdam from Chicago in 1988. I finally received the tape last week and listened to it this past weekend. It features a group out of Chicago known as the Judy Roberts trio, and it is refreshingly good. Because they only played two songs in the "concert" (too many big wigs wanting to sleep on the flight, is my guess why), the tape is filled out with a radio interview/concert hosted by Studs Terkel. Although the Guinness Book of World Records would not recognize the concert, I've no doubt that the concert qualified as the "highest altitude jazz concert", because I'm pretty sure the shuttle astronauts haven't done anything like that. And even if they had, I know they couldn't have a piano up there, so the KLM jet concert would still qualify as the highest altitude jazz piano trio concert, ever, no matter what. (Don, the guy who shared the tape with me, did in fact call Guinness, but they declined to start a category for that.)

The quality of the tape was surprisingly good. I haven't yet learned how the promotion played out, and while I have heard of Terkel, Judy was a new name to me. Anyway, it occurred to me that the more I get into jazz and out in society, the more I find the literati, glitterati, and intelligentsia tend to be closely bound to jazz in one way or another, and I find that fact just fascinating.

At least fascinating enough to share with late-to-jazz readers.