Jazz in the Park

Last Sunday Tom and I went to the Atlanta Jazz Festival.  A jazz guitarist who was described by George Benson as "one of the greatest guitarists I've seen in my whole life" was playing, and that seemed like it would be would be worth going to.  So while Tom was at the monastery I dug a couple of folding chairs out of a closet and went to Kroger for portable food.

 

We were able to park on Virginia Avenue, not too far from Monroe, and walked from there.  At the park, there were lots of people who had clearly arrived early to stake out their favorite location and set up tents.  The International Stage, where we were going, was on the other side of the lake.  There the crowd was smaller.  There were not many people with tents but lots of people with folding chairs and blankets up close to the stage or farther back in the bits of shade that were available.  We put our chairs near a picnic table in the shade and settled in for the afternoon.

The first performer was a Moroccan musician, Ali Amr, who plays the qanun, a stringed instrument that resembles an autoharp.  It was a great performance but it did seem like it was better suited for a late night, dimly lit club than a bright Sunday afternoon.

Next was Diego Figueriedo, the Braziliam guitarist.  He was terrific.  Afterwards Tom joined the crowd at the WRFG tent and bought a CD.  He said that it took a long time because there was lots of conversation and photograph-taking that accompanied the transaction.

We'd checked the weather forecast before we left and it was "chance of rain after 4 p.m."  That didn't seem like a deal-breaker, but soon after 4 the clouds came in.  We moved away from our spot under the tree and closer to the stage, since we didn't need the shade any more, but then it rained.  Unlike many of the other attendees, we hadn't brought umbrellas.  We talked about leaving -- lots of people did -- but the final performer, Cyrille Aimée, is an acclaimed jazz vocalist and we thought hearing her was worth getting wet.  So we turned our chairs over to keep the seats a little drier and took refuge under some trees until the rain passed, which it did in a bit.

She was fabulous and I'm glad we stayed.  She has a wonderful voice and it was a terrific performance.

Not only was the music great, which it was, but it also was the kind of mellow, diverse group in the audience that is enjoyable to be with.  We shared the picnic table with lots of different people over the afternoon.  It was the closest thing I have experienced in Atlanta in my almost 25 years of living here to the concerts in Millennium Park that we have been to in Chicago.  Which raises the question -- if I enjoy this type of event so much, why haven't I ever been before?

In Chicago, we could get to the park on a bus.  We didn't have to drive and we didn't have to figure out where to park and we didn't have to walk very far once we got off the bus.  (I don't mind the walking, but Tom just can't do it any more.)  In Atlanta, MARTA is limited and you can't really get from point A to point B reliably by bus.  Everyone drives everywhere and that means parking is a mess.  I never went to the Atlanta Jazz Festival before because I could not envision getting there without a level of hassle that I wasn't willing to endure.  There are lots of things that I would enjoy doing that I don't do because I don't want to deal with driving and parking.  Maybe this is just me, but it does feel like this is a quality-of-life tax I pay for living in a city that is so car-dependent.  And of course, I *have* a car.

It ended up not being bad, the getting-there-hassle-part, although it was at the edge of what Tom could do in terms of walking.  Afterwards, we were talking about the possibility of getting to the park by bicycle.  I told him that the new high-tech traffic-stopping light finally got installed on Monroe, making it safer to cross from Cumberland into Piedmont Park.  He asked if there was anywhere at the park to park bicycles.  Yes, I told him, the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition was there, just inside the park, offering valet parking.  

Fired Up! at Fire Station No. 19

This morning Iain ran the 4th Annual Fired Up 5K race. Registration was set up inside Fire Station No. 19, and the fire truck was outside. I think a few of the fire fighters ran in the race, but most of them were standing around outside. There were also several volunteers from the Greenbriar Lions Club there, middle-aged African-American men and women, wearing yellow vests covered with pins and patches, helping people get in the right line during registration, staffing the finish line, helping with different tasks. I asked them where they met, and they said they met on Thursdays at Greenbriar. I told them that my father had been a Lion for many many years, and they asked if I'd ever been to a Lions Club meeting. I said I had and they smiled and invited me to visit their club. They make the rounds of community events, it sounded like - they told me what event they were working at next weekend, but I don't remember. This event supports scholarships for kids attending Atlanta Public Schools. Fire fighters - community volunteers - scholarships for kids to go to college - seems like a winner for the neighborhood.

This isn't one of the big 5K races - only a couple hundred people were registered, and with the beginning and ending of the race at the same place, the organizers didn't have that many people there to work the event. The runners went off a few minutes after 8:30 a.m., and then those of us who were waiting for runners to return had 16 minutes to wait for the first of them to cross the finish line. I helped put the orange cones in place that defined the lane the runners walked down, after crossing the finishing line, and put orange cones in place to keep traffic from turning on to the street from North Highland. (You never can tell what people will do. Someone pulled out of a driveway farther down Los Angeles while the runners were coming up the hill toward the finish line.)

Sometime after the runners left and before they started coming back, a man came over from the store across from the fire station on the other side of Los Angeles and told the yellow-vested Lions Club volunteer who was staffing the finish line that there were cars parked in the store's parking lot that shouldn't be there. She was very pleasant and said, "Go talk to them at the fire station." He said again that there were cars parked in their parking lot that shouldn't be there and that if people didn't move them immediately they would be towed. She smiled and said again, "Go talk to them at the fire station." So he left us and headed over to talk to one of the fire fighters.

I said to the woman in the yellow vest that if I had a retail business that just happened to be across the street from a fire station, and that fire station decided to sponsor an event to benefit children attending Atlanta Public Schools, I don't think my response to a few cars in my parking lot early in the morning would be to call a tow truck.

Iain came in with a time of 33 minutes and some seconds. Steve and I waited for him at the finish line and cheered for him when he crossed it. I walked back home at about 9:15; Steve and Iain stayed a little longer. At least by the time I left, no tow truck had arrived.