Hot Jazz at the North Street Cabaret

 

Today our houseguest went home, so that's kind of sad. I thought I had plans with some of the Rosary Ladies tonight, but there was some sort of miscommunication, so instead Travalon and I went to the Kingdom for dinner. There was a free choral concert downtown at Lutheran Cathedral of the Midwest, but parking would have been horrible with a Badger basketball game going on at the same time. Travalon looked up who was playing at the North Side Cabaret, and it was a group called the Gentlemen's Anti-Temperance League, which the name alone sounded promising. We went, and they were a tight quartet playing hot jazz. The bass player was particularly animated. Here's a video:

They played a lot of original stuff, but Travalon was happy that they played some stuff he recognized from the 40's Junction station. They played "Hell," a song by the Squirrel Nut Zippers from when I was in college and swing was briefly in vogue, and they blew it out of the water. Now I'm Gen X, and these guys were all Millennials, and they looked like Millennial hipsters, yet oddly like men from the 30's too. It was kind of a cool look. Hipster cool cats. A lot of the audience were Millennial hipsters too, and I felt so old. I thought of my own band, where half the members are octogenarians, and I felt a bit wistful. We haven't even practiced in ages, I suppose because Hardingfele is busy trapping feral cats, one member's mother is dying of cancer, another one is busy with a ukulele group, another one is busy with her grandkids, and the last one is busy with a string quartet. And then I'm just... busy. I remember when I used to sit in with a band once and they would immediately recruit me into the band, but those opportunities don't seem to come by any more at my age. Anyway, if I could play in any kind of band, a hot jazz band like we saw tonight seems far more appealing than a contra dance band, but do hot jazz bands ever need mandolins? Maybe I could play the banjolele (of course, I'd have to acquire one first) in a Prohibition-era jazz band, because they always had banjoleles, and if I can play the ukulele, I can play the banjolele. It's just a ukulele with the body of a very small banjo. 

Here are some rock posters Travalon bought at the Willy Street Fair. The first is the Rolling Stones.

The second is of course Paul McCartney.

I liked this third one because it has mushrooms on it. It's the Allman Brothers Band.

I need to see if any of these glow under blacklight. I'm still shocked that the cheap rosary I got at Holy Hill doesn't, because yesterday I prayed it outside, and it glowed in the sunlight the way most things that glow under blacklight do. It sure seems like ultraviolet rays are making it light up...

Famous Hat