Laishley Park in Punta Gorda offers a gazebo with pond and fountain, veterans garden, shelter with picnic tables, restrooms, fishing pier, boat ramp, sidewalk for walking, jogging and biking, parking throughout park.
This park hosts The 8th Annual Wine & Jazz Festival featuring sax player Mindi Abair, Rick Braun, Richard Elliott and Sergio Mendes.
Laishley Park, 100 West Retta Esplanade, Punta Gorda, Florida 33950 (Fort Myers area)
The Naperville Community Concert Center is city-owned facility located in the heart of downtown’s Central Park at 104 E. Benton Avenue. While the Concert Center is a year-round home to the Naperville Municipal Band and Young Naperville Singers, it is also available for use by Naperville-based groups.
The Concert Center is designed to accommodate performing arts groups and boasts a large performance stage, acoustic equipment, rehearsal and meeting space and dressing rooms.
The Naperville Jazz Festival will take place at the Naperville Community Concert Center located in Central Park in downtown Naperville, June 16, 2012. Smooth Jazz fans will appreciate the concert of Mindi Abair and Friends, Featuring David Pack and Jeff Golub.
Naperville Community Concert Center, 104 E Benton Ave, Naperville, Illinois 60540
Sage Court is an outdoor concert & entertainment venue located at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort and Spa.
With grass under your feet and stars in the sky, this is a unique and wonderful way to enjoy your favorite artists. From traditional reserved seating to a luxury lounge seating section or your own private room balcony, Sage Court has many options for you to enjoy the show!.
The Sage Court is an outdoor concert venue that opened in 2010. The regular reserved seats are set in grass! The amphitheater is surrounded by the beautiful amenities of the JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort, with several restaurants choices, pools, golf and luxury guest-rooms. You don’t have to be a guest at the resort to purchase tickets for a concert at Sage Court, but why not make it a mini-vacation? Packages that include a room and concert tickets are offered.
If you can, stay at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort & Spa (make a reservation). Otherwise, try to find other accommodations nearby in both North Phoenix and North Scottsdale. You can’t use public transportation to get here so you’ll need to either drive or take a taxi.
Sage Court stages a two-day jazz festival at the beautiful JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort & Spa featuring 20 of your favorite artists! The Desert Ridge Jazz Festival is a smooth jazz spectacular, featuring several days of appearances by nationally and internationally acclaimed jazz musicians like Euge Groove, Peter White, Brian Simpson, Keiko Matsui, Mindi Abair and others.
Tom Pinch, also known as “The Time-Lapse Painter” due to the captivating time-lapse painting videos he makes of many of his paintings, is a professional gallery and commission artist and a native Southern Californian currently based in Temecula, CA.
Largely self-taught, Pinch has sought out and learned directly from his mentor Richard Schmid as well as with Morgan Weistling and several others – sometimes involving extensive travel from California to New York City, Washington D.C. and Putney, Vermont in order to do so.
As a representational artist, he has achieved a uniquely versatile style which he describes as “Painterly Realism.” Working in oils, he approaches each individual work of art from a fresh perspective. His paintings have been exhibited in collections throughout the world, including the United States Golf Association Museum in New Jersey. It is there where Pinch’s 40″x30″ portraits of both Tiger Woods and the late PGA Tour player Payne Stewart hang as two of only 35 carefully selected portraits in their exclusive permanent museum collection.
His impressive client list includes many corporate commissions as well as private commissions. His client list continues to grow along with the desire for his artwork. In 2006, he began creating fine art gallery works in order to reach a broader spectrum of collectors as well as to reach his full creative potential. Although still an active commission artist, his gallery paintings of subjects of his choosing has since become his main creative inspiration and focus.
The illustrated picture is available here. For more information about the artist visit this website.
The 7th Annual Wine & Jazz Festival will be held on February 17th. 18th and 19th 2012 with the main event on Saturday Feb 18th, 2012. The Rippingtons, Peter White and Mindi Abair are the headliners.
The name, Punta Gorda, comes from the Spanish, meaning Fat Point. This historic small town is a hidden treasure of Florida and lies as a “Fat Point”, sticking out into Charlotte Harbor – one of the US’s largest natural harbors. Centrally located between Sarasota to the North and Fort Myers tothe South, Punta Gorda is a delightful location, within a comfortable driving distance from Tampa, Orlando and Miami.
As the only incorporated city of Charlotte County, Florida, Punta Gorda is the vibrant engine of the area. It boasts wonderful restaurants, marinas and a pace of life that people from around the world come to enjoy.
Saxophonist/vocalist/songwriter Mindi Abair has been surrounded by talented musicians her entire life. Her paternal grandmother was an opera singer, and her father was a saxophonist and B3 player in a blue-eyed soul group called The Entertainers – a gig that kept the whole family on the road for several years throughout the early ‘70s. By the time the band broke up and the Abairs put down roots in St. Petersburg, Florida, five-year-old Mindi had already demonstrated musical aspirations of her own by taking up the piano.
She made the switch to saxophone in the fourth grade, and took part in every band program available in elementary, middle and high school. After a year at the University of North Florida, she transferred to Berklee, where she graduated magna cum laude with a degree in woodwind performance.
Abair recalls some wise counseling she received during her college years: “My saxophone teacher told me every week, ‘You have to start your own band. Don’t try to be someone else. Don’t practice a bunch of David Sanborn licks or Wayne Shorter licks. Go out and be your own person.’ It was the best advice anyone could have given me.”
She took the advice and ran with it, all the way to the opposite coast. She landed in Los Angeles, where she began a dues-paying process that lasted nearly a decade and included touring gigs with keyboardists John Tesh and Bobby Lyle and guitarist Jonathan Butler. When she was home from the road, she booked her own band in just about any club that would have them. And on those occasions when none would, she played on the streets of Santa Monica. “I didn’t want to wait tables when I had a degree in music,” she says. “I’d take my horn down to 3rd Street Promenade and just play. I paid my rent for quite a few months by doing that.”
Abair released her first album, the independently produced Always and Never the Same, in 1999, while touring with the Backstreet Boys. By the beginning of the new decade, the combination of a nonstop performing and the well-received indie release had helped her solidify her musical identity. “By the time I signed on with Verve in 2002,” she says, “I really knew who I was as an artist. I knew what I wanted to say, and I had a sound that was mine and no one else’s.”
It Just Happens That Way, her major-label debut in 2003, was the first in a string of solo recordings on Verve that also included I Can’t Wait for Christmas (2004), Come As You Are (2005) and Life Less Ordinary (2007). She made the move to Peak, a division of Concord, with the 2008 release of Stars, an album that showcased – more than any of her previous recordings – her attractive vocal work as an engaging counterpoint to her solid saxophone chops.
This combination of highly refined skills takes even more of the spotlight on In Hi-Fi Stereo. Co-produced by Abair and R&B mainstay Rex Rideout, her newest album was released in May 2010 on Heads Up International, a division of Concord Music Group. In addition to Abair’s touring band, the album features a number of guest players: veteran drummer James Gadson (a frequent session player for Bill Withers, Amos Lee and Nikka Costa), bassist Reggie McBride (Aretha, Rickie Lee Jones and Keb’ Mo’), Mindi’s Berklee classmate and friend Lalah Hathaway, nominated 2010 R&B Female Vocalist of the year, Ryan Collins and David Ryan Harris.
In Hi-Fi Stereo features a more organic approach than some of her earlier releases. “We didn’t worry so much about making sure everything sounded perfect,” Abair says. “It was more about just the spirit and the vibe in the studio at the time, and getting the right takes and having fun and playing off each other. This is a really feel-good party record.
Mindi Abair – Blue Mindi published with permission of Bettie Grace Miner.
For almost three decades, Dimitrou’s Jazz Alley has been a West Coast ‘must’ for all the towering figures in the world of jazz – stars such as Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Betty Carter, and Bill Evans have played there.
In its first twenty years, Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley has become the West Coast’s premiere jazz club. Every week the club brings the greatest names in jazz to Seattle’s audiences. The nightclub first opened its doors in 1979 in Seattle’s University District. An intimate bistro setting, it attracted a diverse clientele. Equally popular among college students and die-hard jazz aficionados, one always found an exciting mixture of personalities and performers.
Six years later Jazz Alley relocated to the larger and more accessible club at 6th and Lenora; the perfect venue for introducing new fans to world class jazz music while still offering the exuberant atmosphere of the old establishment. Since moving to the present location the club has undergone two remodels. In July of 1990, the club completed a renovation with the expansion of the existing stage and the addition of a full mezzanine overlooking the stage.
In June of 2002 Jazz Alley was at it again. The new room includes a state of the art sound system, expanded stage, and the addition of over 100 seats, all while maintaining the original bistro ambience that makes Jazz Alley the intimate experience it is.
Jazz Alley was recently picked as both the Editor’s Choice and Audience Choice for Seattle’s Best Jazz club by Citysearch Seattle. In 2007, DownBeat Magazine voted Jazz Alley as one of the top 100 jazz clubs in the world. In years past they have also been voted “Best Jazz Club” by the Seattle Weekly.
Jazz Alley is a restaurant as well as a premier live music venue. Their menu features Northwest cuisine and they strive to support local organic farmers, fishermen, and food producers. They use non GMO ingredients as much as possible. They are also keenly aware of dietary restrictions and food allergies and therefore have included vegetarian, gluten-free, and non dairy items on their menu.
We welcome the support of smooth jazz artists like Grafitti with Special Guests Dennis Chambers and Gary Grainger on January 10th and 11th, 2012, Jeff Lorber with Special Guest Randy Brecker 19th – 22nd January, 2012, Peter White 2nd – 5th February 2012 and Brian Culbertson 14th – 19th February 2012. In March are announced Mindi Abair and Chuck Loeb.
