The Wynton Marsalis Septet played Red Butte Garden & Arboretum last Wednesday (7/8/2026). If a book were written entirely about the night, instead of being called Where The Crawdads Sing, Where The Dragonflies Divebomb would have been far more apropos title.
Looming rain wanted its time in the spotlight instead. To my knowledge, “Stormy Humpday” isn’t a jazz standard. Still, the clouds got heavy and dark. Lightning lit up the distant sky and occasional raindrops made contact. And when surprise winds kicked up quickly, gusts had their way with all the musicians’ sheet music, blowing them off stage and into bushes just a few songs in, forcing a longer-than-normal intermission.
Photo by Paul Montano @montanophoto
Still, Wynton Marsalis and the rest of his collective are real pros: they weathered the would-be threat of a storm, right along with the rest of us. They played beautifully — occasionally ferociously — steering us away from standards and producing originals like “Be Present,” “Ballot Box Blues,” and “Point Counterpoint.” Horn and piano and drums dominated. Barring this performance and August’s Herbie Hancock concert, there aren’t any other jazz heavyweights on the roster this season, which made it doubly nice (and even seemingly important) for this show to happen, summer weather be damned.
By the time the group closed things out with “2:19 Blues” — written by early New Orleans pianist/singer Mamie Desdune and famously recorded by Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra in 1940 — they’d invited a young someone from the audience to play his trumpet alongside them. Improvisation reigned supreme.
The crowd was on its feet, rushing the stage and dancing. The storm had dissipated. The grass was still dry. Sometimes the outcome is exactly as great as they say it’ll be: all’s well that ended well.
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