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Concert Report: Hank Jones Trio, Taylor Eigsti Trio

I got invited to go with some work friends to this show, which is part of this year's Stanford Jazz Festival. I haven't been doing a good job incorporating much jazz into my life lately, so I thought it would be a good thing for me. And it was! The opening trio, led by Taylor Eigsti, who is only 17 years old, only played a few numbers but I enjoyed it. The piano was obviously the star, though, so there wasn't much interesting back-and-forth energy in their performance. Seeing someone so young that is so good at something doesn't always make me feel good about what I have done with my life, though. But I could still appreciate his talent.

The real star, though, was Hank Jones, who is now 84 years old. 84 is old. But this guy was still really, really good. Not good for his age, even - he'd be good for any age. And his bass player and drummer were also really good, and I got to see a little of the cool group improvisational style that is so different than what I do in my job. It is wonderful to watch people that in sync and that talented working together to make something so wonderful. They played songs from a lot of different composers, and it seemed like mostly a more classic, lyrical style of jazz and blues. They still kept to a pretty structured main theme - piano solo - bass solo - drum solo - everyone back to the main theme format for each song, which was a little disappointing to me because they could have mixed it up a little more based on the songs. But they all seemed to be having a really good time, which lends a good energy to the performance. And they played for almost 3 hours, which seemed really long for a jazz concert to me, at least compared to other shows I have seen. Not bad for an 84 year old at all. Wow.

The show was held at Dinkelspiel Auditorium at Stanford, which seemed like a nice auditorium but not a great place to see jazz. Of course, the crowd was very old and white, and a lot of them seemed to sneak out a little early as the show went late, so maybe it was the right atmosphere for them. But I should really find someone to go try out Yoshi's or Jazz at Pearl's or something and see if that has a better atmosphere. Which I guess is a good sign about this concert - it reminded me I shouldn't get too caught up in one kind of music.