Dazzle, our favorite Denver jazz club, is our choice for many family celebrations. This year, we went somewhere else for my husband’s birthday.
It started at Dazzle, though. We were there to hear Hal Aqua and the Lost Tribe. We’re kind of Aqua groupies. His group plays klezmer, the violin- and clarinet-driven folk music of Eastern European Jews that manages to be melancholy and exuberant at the same time.
The Lost Tribe mixes klezmer with jazz and reggae and anything else that strikes the fancy of an inventive band of musicians. One night at Dazzle, they announced they would be crowding onto a stage for a concert called Jews Do the Trinity scheduled for a day before my husband’s birthday. We got tickets right away.
The trinity in this case was Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. The venue was Denver’s Temple Emanuel, which has a history of welcoming community events.
A half dozen members of Hal Aqua and the Lost Tribe were joined by a dozen other Jewish Denver-area musicians in this celebration of what their fellow Jews Simon, Cohen and Dylan and so many others have contributed to the American songbook. Several Jews Do the Trinity performers were rabbis. One looked like a young Dylan. Aqua was the emcee.
We’d missed previous concerts -- Jews do Jews – that had paid tribute separately over the years to Simon, Cohen and Dylan. The Trinity concert featured the greatest hits of the previous shows.
The Trinity night included songs from Simon’s "Graceland." When that album dropped in 1986, my mom Betty was tickled to hear Simon singing her name. I can still see her little smile whenever "You Can Call Me Al" played on the radio. Mom, who died in 2016, would have been 80 this year. She would have been delighted to hear the entire cast of Jews do the Trinity belting out:
If you'll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al.
I enjoyed Jews do the Trinity for the music and the memories the music evoked. As we filed into the parking lot afterward, I wasn’t even too upset at the thought that Cohen's "Hallelujah" would surely be stuck in my head for months to come.
