We are down to the wire, this is the ninth and last night of the Festival. Our plan is kind of loose after the start. The Festival newsletter announced that club pass holders have a bonus, free admission, first come first served, to Steep Canyon Rangers at 4 PM in Kodak Hall. Good for us not for the Festival, clearly they have a lot of empty seats. We will be there! We plan to go to Kilbourn for Clifton Anderson Trio and then on to Harro East for The Wood Brothers. Since the food at Harro is pretty good we will probably satisfy the stomach’s needs there and then move on to either the Big Tent or Christ Church (or both). We plan to finish the Festival with our first stop at The Rochester Club for Alex Pangman. We will see how the predicted rains and chill affect the street vibe and attendance levels.

Last night we started at Harro East at 5:30 with the Yellow Jackets, and no for you Rochesterians reading this they have nothing to do with the University of Rochester or their acapella group of the same name. We couldn’t sit still through their performance and certainly couldn’t even begin to think of leaving. They have been at the Festival before and we have heard them more than once. If they come back when we are here, we will be in the audience again! As we headed for Lutheran Church for Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra with  Ingrid Jensen we had time so we stopped in at Kilbourn for Kurt Rosenwinkle New Quartet. We got seats down front and heard the last number. This was enough to encourage us to return at 10 for the full show.

We stopped in front of the big tent for Wegman’s Sushi before we headed over to Lutheran where it turns out the Jensen group are Canadian not Scandinavian. With something like 20 saxophones and brass on stage it was quite a full house and the sound was very full and even melodic. Ingrid plays trumpet and between brilliant solos and support bits she spent an inordinate amount of time repeating a cycle of adjustments and clearings of her trumpet. I wouldn’t say anything about that except that it became distracting into the third number. We did stay to the end and might have considered coming back tonight if she hadn’t announced that the music would be more “pop” oriented.

After Lutheran, Freshly Ground was just starting in the Big Tent and we took our line chairs and settled in just behind the sound booth for the show. This was a less than brilliant location as the guys in the booth spent a lot of time apparently tracking down some glitch that didn’t seem to be affecting the performance, in my ears. The Afro Pop group is very good and if the rains don’t dampen the crowds ardor they should be a real crowd pleaser at 7 on the East and Chestnut stage. A bit of a side note, Ron Netsky commented on volume levels in his blog the other day so during this seemingly very loud performance I downloaded a Sound Meter App on my phone and got reading of 80 to 83 Db. Later I got the same reading in Kilbourn for Rosenwinkle. The meter says this is the equivalent of a busy street or Alarm Clock. We walked over to Kilbourn at 9:30 expecting to be in line for a few minutes. Instead we walked right in and were able to get our preferred seats. The hall was half empty. It did fill some by show time, but never approached sold out. We did enjoy the rather esoteric performance and I only napped a couple of times, it is definitely catching up with me.

After that we were off to the Plaza for the Jam Session. This night plenty of performers showed up to play including trumpet, sax, trombone and guitar. The featured guitarist for the first set we heard was John Nugent’s wife who has some fine chops of her own. At one point as we were standing watching Steve Gadd came over to Carol and suggested she take the seat he was vacating. We actually got to sit until we could no longer keep our eyes open.