Dawsonites flocked to Jazz on the Wing DAWSON CITY - The poster said Jazz on the Wing was going to be an evening of jazz for piano and trumpet, but there wasn't a trumpet to be seen in Dawson recently.
Apr 16, 2002
Dawsonites flocked to Jazz on the Wing
DAWSON CITY - The poster said Jazz on the Wing was going to be an evening of jazz for piano and trumpet, but there wasn't a trumpet to be seen in Dawson recently.
Instead, Alan Matheson trotted out his cornet and flugelhorn and put them through their paces. He did so while Grant Simpson tickled the ivories of the venerable (and somewhat battered) piano that services students at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture.
Well, Matheson's chosen horns were close relatives of the brassier trumpet. Their mellow sounds, sometimes assisted by a mute and a bathroom plunger, were perhaps better suited to an evening of unplugged entertainment at the Oddfellow's Hall the evening of April 6.
Matheson, a music instructor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver Community College and Capilano College, is in the Yukon to adjudicate at the current 34th annual Rotary Music Festival Week.
He and Simpson, a staple on the Yukon jazz scene and musical godfather to the Peters Drury Trio, hit it off last year at the festival and decided to do a little tour before the event began this year. Haines Junction and Dawson were the lucky rural settings for evenings of traditional jazz standards.
The pair chose to dwell mostly in a musical milieu which would have predated either of their births, with just a few excursions into the present for their own compositions, which were primarily exercises in that same style.
Aside from those personal numbers, the two 45-minute sets featured material associated with or written by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Jack Teagarden and Hoagy Carmichael, just to name some of the great names on the program.
There were a few missed notes here and there (this is unplugged, live and without benefit of too many rehearsals, so sometimes one or the other of them wasn't quite sure where a piece was going to end).
The only annoying note of the evening (a C note, actually) was provided by the fire alarm system. It went off for some reason before the show actually got started and continued to beep sporadically at the control box through the entire first set. It was annoyingly off the beat, but the musicians ignored it.
Dawson's jazz lovers, which included folks of all ages, including members of the Band 10 class from the Robert Service School, have a lot to be grateful for. Thanks are due to the institute, the Dawson City Arts Society, the Dawson City Music Festival, the Rotary Music Festival, the Jazz Society of the Yukon and the territorial Yukon Arts Funding Program for bringing such cool entertainment to all the cats and kittens in the Klondike.
- Dan Davidson - Star Correspondent