Presto Electro

I found my camera in my underwear drawer the other day. It had been missing for kinda a while, so I couldn't really remember what the last thing I photographed was. I fired it up, and was greeted with the gleaming, smiling face of this guy:

As you can probably imagine, this is not a face that is easy to forget… I knew I had seen it before, but I couldn't quite place it. So I skipped to the next picture:

NOW I had it, the Flaming Lips show!!! I forgot I brought my camera along for the show and promptly buried it in socks when I got home. Finding these pictures made me start to reminisce about the Flaming Lips show… It was amazing. The music was great. The surrounding crowd was awesome. And it cost exactly zero dollars.

…And this weekend, Denton did it AGAIN! But bigger, better, and for three days straight!!!

Last weekend was Jazzfest. Jazzfest is a three-day festival celebrating the tremendous amount of art and jazz in Denton and the surrounding area. It was epic. 200,000 people descended upon Quakertown Park to enjoy hundreds of artists of all sorts of media. You could spend a whole day just wandering around, checking out all of the paintings, sculptures, drawings and the like. I almost did on Sunday! I spent a good hour taking in the sights, but I had to get back to catch the UNT African Drumming and Dance Ensemble. (African Music is one of the few genres that can compete with Math Rock when it comes to poly-rhythms, so there is no way I was going to miss UNT's ADDE)

On the Friday before, I spent almost all of my time on the UNT Showcase Stage. This was where all of the UNT bands played, and I really only wanted to see UNT bands anyway. We're a legendary jazz school! It would be almost sacrilegious to go elsewhere for awesome jazz. My favorite band of the night was definitely the UNT Latin Jazz Ensemble. These guys were so awesome that loads of people hopped up out of their seats to dance to the ridiculously catchy Cuban beats.

And once again, The City of Denton and the myriad Jazzfest sponsors aimed it right at the typical student budget: 7 Stages, over 2,200 performers (Including headliners like Chick Corea, Brave Combo, Jimmie Vaughn and The 1 O'clock Lab Band) and countless visual artists of all kinds for exactly zero dollars. I love this city