Even The Window Shopping Is Expensive
Day Three.
Spirits are high. My concerns about last night's outdoor show, while not without basis in reality, were perhaps the result of playing cold outdoor shows in places less well-equipped for cold weather than a ski resort seven thousand feet up the Wasatch Mountain Range. There were, to my recollection, eight different heaters blasting the stage throughout the show, which was enough to keep me almost in tune for the majority of the performance.
One cool thing about playing ski towns is that they invariably hook you up with some kind of lodge/bungalow/party condo-type place to use as a green room and/or crash pad, and one cool thing about this particular lodge/bungalow/party condo-type place was the absurd number of hot tubs available to us: Two. Okay, maybe that doesn't sound like a whole lot of hot tubs, but trust me, when you generally have access to zero hot tubs, two hot tubs is hot tubs galore. Tub City. Population: most of The Revivalists. Tubbin' up a storm over here. It's hard to beat a nice pre-show and post-show tub. If only there were some way to play a rock show from a hot tub. Get to work, science.
Anyway. It's snowing in Beaver Creek. Not just "snowy,” or "snowed on,” but snowing. Spent a bit of time walking around the outdoor mall above the Vilar PAC, where we're playing tonight. It is a scene from a Peanuts Christmas special: big, white flakes flutter about as children trace lazy circles around a snow-blanketed skating rink while a jazz piano trio wafts out of a nearby loudspeaker, which is "loud” in name and name alone.
CONTENTIOUS OPINION TIME:
Is there any better possible musical ensemble than the jazz piano trio? In spite of my severe and well-documented bias towards horns, I'm not sure I can imagine a more perfect configuration of musicians. I'm not talking about individual groups, mind you- The Beatles, for example, or Mozart at the helm of a Vienna orchestra, could best just about anyone or anything. But I don't think there's another instrumentation with the potential to be so intimate yet so spacious, so spontaneous but so tight.
