The Montreux Jazz Festival is held every July, and in 1996, your humble Resident Smartass had the honor of being a member of the Northern Illinois University Jazz Ensemble which was invited to perform there. The original plan was for us to be the headliner one night in the 1800-seat Miles Davis Hall at the Montreux Convention Center. But then our bandleader received an offer he couldn’t refuse: we were invited to instead act as the backup band for Quincy Jones during a concert celebrating his 50 years in music in the 3500-seat Auditorium Stravinski.

Our band toured Switzerland for 10 days, and then arrived in Montreux, where the handful of German words we’d picked up during our travels immediately became useless. While we’d worked on Q’s charts on our own before starting the tour, once in Montreux we rehearsed them again over the course of three days with his hand-picked rhythm section and a slew of guest artists. On the fourth day, we had a dress rehearsal in the afternoon ahead of the concert that evening. The concert sold out so quickly, the festival organizers decided to open the dress rehearsal and sell tickets to that. The dress rehearsal also sold out. We ended up performing for a combined audience of well over 7000 people.

All that preamble is to explain how it came to be that a boring college kid from the suburbs got to share the stage with the woman Quincy Jones introduced as “one of the most soulful creatures on the planet, Miss Chaka Khan.”

Did I bump into Chaka Khan backstage? Yes. Did I speak to her? No. I was totally star struck. I smiled at her and she smiled back. What’s important is that I didn’t make a fool of myself.

I’m playing bass trombone, sitting nearest to the camera when they point it in our direction. You can catch a brief glimpse of me at 4:18, and then I get a few solid seconds of screen time starting at 5:31. I’m wearing glasses and a King of Pop-style single black glove (it was an orthopedic glove I wore for medical reasons, not fashion.) The other solo vocalist is Mick Hucknall from Simply Red. The trombone soloist is James Morrison.

I’ll end with a shameless plug: on Friday, Jan. 23, I’ll be performing with Heisenberg Uncertainty Players at Hey Nonny in Arlington Heights, IL. It’s an album release party for our latest, called Return to the Enchanted Forest. I’ll have more about it in tomorrow’s Day Thread.

Have a great day!