Craig Martin Experience. Courtesy/CMEThe Los Alamos County Summer Concert Series presents two local jazz bands at 7 p.m., today at Ashley Pond Park. The show is free and features many of Los Alamos’ best musicians.
Opening the concert will be the Craig Martin Experience. You may know some of these cats: Craig Martin plays tenor sax and clarinet. John Frary plays drums, Carl Hagelberg – trumpet, Quinn Marksteiner – alto sax, Mike Rogers – guitar, Aaron Anderson – keyboards and Rob Heineman plays the standup bass. The band plays a jazz and rock fusion.
The concert will be CB FOX Night. We’ve been producing this Series for 26 years now and CB FOX has always been a sponsor.
First time I heard the term “fusion” was when the great Miles Davis made a comment about the 1969 Woodstock Festival. Miles was used to playing jazz fests such as Newport, Rhode Island, Monterey, Calif., and those incredible European concerts. Great attendance was 1,000 people. Woodstock had something close to a million fans.
Miles decided to fuse his jazz with rock. He’d play at some of the Bill Graham concerts across the states. He’d play on gigs with BB King, the Grateful Dead, Santana and many others. Miles became an early proponent of Jazz fusion and even had some rap and hip-hop on his last albums.
The Craig Martin Experience plays up-tempo funky and Latin rhythms, aka fusion. You’ll hear some standards from the band Friday as well as tunes by Lee Morgan, Horace Silver, Weather Report, the Yellow Jackets, Chick Corea and the late, great, super star of be-bop and fusion, Miles Davis.
Taking the stage a little after 8 p.m. is the Ryan Finn Septet. Finn graduated from Los Alamos High School in 2000. He studied music at Loyola University in New Orleans. Finn plays the trombone. He moved to St. Lucia in the southern Caribbean in 2004 where he made his living teaching and playing music. He moved back to the US and Los Alamos after eight years. The music he plays has a Caribbean tilt. The Septet will play reggae, ska, calypso, soca, zouk, salsa, cha-cha, samba and more. All of the music will be played in a jazz style. The Ryan Finn Septet members are some of the best jazz musicians in New Mexico.
Tonight should be another great concert. There’ll be plenty of chances to dance, so come on out and support live music in Los Alamos. Next week, June 12, we’ll have the Jimmy Stadler Country Review. The June 12 concert will be part of Day 1 for the Los Alamos ChamberFest. It should be a great two days, plus June 5 makes it a super three days!
