WEST BEND, Wis. — I will forever love Madison. Not for the unending quantities of liquor pouring from its residents' collective cabinet or the 16 varieties of organic, gluten-free granola bars available in every convenience store. No, foremost it is the plethora of hole-in-the-wall concerts (yes, the very same Ms. Probst hates for denying her) I cannot get my fill of. I drink them in and dance — on the inside, usually, for the comfort and sanity of my fellow patrons.
Ironically, or so I thought, I never attended a concert that didn't involve bow ties and Shostakovich before I came here. I lived in the heathen suburbs, unaware that popular music had genres beyond metal, '80s metal, heavy metal and death metal. Little did I realize it is not the musicians, but the environment and audience that make a concert, a concert.
And thus I would never trade the high school rec. basement that is the Corral Room (located in a cozy cellar below the Tornado Room off Capitol Square) for, definitely not just as an example, the West Bend Ziegler Kettle Morraine Jazz Festival.
Even the name is too much to digest. It took several repetitions on the phone with the eager representative from Ron Sonntag, the media relations company that insisted this was the event our student newspaper had to cover.
I dimly recalled a blues fest I thought was in Sun Prairie. And there was no way there could be more than one jazz festival in Wisconsin that Saturday. Hold on, an interview with the son of the great Clint Eastwood? I was sold to the tune of six Kenny Gs. And I mean that purely in the saxophonic sense.
Even when I discovered my error, that tickets would cost upward of $75, that West Bend was almost two hours east of Madison, and that the festival was secretly nothing but smooth jazz, I was convinced the sheer spectacle would be worth it.
"People come from all over the country," my boundlessly optimistic Rotary club guide informed me, gesturing to the hundreds gathered around us in Riverside Park.
If you glanced at my first (and hopefully only) experiment with nonlinear newspaper column writing last week, you may already have a small idea of what was in store for me as I set out Sept. 8 to see what I could see. But nothing could have prepared me for the (upper-middle-class, adults ages 30-54) Kublai Khan pleasure dome that awaited, and the host of morality play stereotypes I could not help but cast as the people within.
You have seen tents before, I assume. You haven't seen 40-foot-high tents with layered arches and toothcomb trim. That, along with the free dump the grounds of Riverside conveniently neighbor, was what greeted our party as we rolled up to the heavily (yellow-vested volunteer) guarded gates.
The well-paved path to the Promised Land was lined with prairie grass, classic cars and pilgrims of every stripe — as long as you think stripes should all be horizontal, blue and between ?
