A time for reunion
Two couples make the jazz festival a time to catch up
By PETER BOLTZ
Express Staff Writer
Last week’s jazz festival was not just about jazz. It was about
friends getting together.
Bart and Dorothy Brassey and their friends Chuck and Gladyne Blanton have
been meeting each other at the Swing’n’Dixie Jazz Jamboree in Sun Valley since
it began 11 years ago. The couples spoke in an interview at the River Run Lodge before the
band Crazy Rhythm played on Friday.
The Brasseys live in Boise and the Blantons on the Kona coast of the Big
Island of Hawaii. With each couple having three homes, in a total of six different places,
Sun Valley’s jazz festival makes a good meeting place for them.
But their friendship goes back further than 11 years. Bart, Chuck and
Gladyne met at the University of Idaho. Bart met Dorothy later—she went to the
University of Oregon.
They all remember the years before, during and after World War II as
"a great time to be alive."
Except, Bart said, "the part about getting shot at in the war."
Remembering the music of the late ‘30s and ‘40s, the four of
them recalled bands and musicians: Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey,
"Fats" Waller, Jack Teagarten and Ziggy Elman.
They all remembered seeing Tommy Dorsey at the Miramar in Boise. Chuck
said it cost $1.50 to get in, and "in those days, that was a lot of money."
Chuck had a laugh about seeing Teagarten and his band wearing bandannas.
He said they wore long hair "well before the Beatles."
They all remembered how trumpet player Teagarten, who once played with the
Dorsey Band, would play And the Angels Sing. He would play so high, they said, that
they’d get nervous.
They criticized the pop music of today as too loud, too repetitive and
without melody. Chuck described it as so much "boom, boom, boom."
Then the four of them calculated the number of "boom boomers"
they had produced--eight. They laughed when they realized their children’s generation
are now "boom boomers once removed" from the current pop music scene.
When asked if they were part of the motor home city parked in the River
Run parking lot, they all looked as if they wanted to say "No way."
Chuck said the only time he had traveled in a motor home, his heat went
out in the middle of the night. He still remembers going out at 2 a.m. into the cold
looking for an electrical outlet to plug his auxiliary heat into.
Bart added what Chuck did not say: "Motor homes are too much trouble.
You have to be a plumber, an electrician and everything else if you’re going to use
one."
So when they attend the jazz jamboree, they stay in local lodges.
