Blue

The parking lot at the Union Station was noticeably void of vehicles. The interior of the building was no different. As I walked past the Remington display, I felt like I was walking through someone else’s living room. I made my way into the main room to find about 100 seats arranged facing a small riser, which had a drum kit and guitar amp perched upon it. A quarter inch cable stretched from the amp and made its way into a hollow body tiger stripe acoustic/electric guitar. The vibration of the strings, converted into a language of swirling positive and negatively charged electrons, made its way back through the cable, around the circuitry of the amp, and came out of the speaker not as choppy sine waves, but as an array of curvy lines, colored shades of blue which explored the room, snaking through the rows of chairs and soaring to the heights of the ceiling, disappearing just before the next wave came rushing through the room turning everything they touched into the same mellow colors they displayed. This is the blues.

Duffy Kane was not alone in painting the room. With him were Ben Jennings and Ken Critchfield who used their instruments in the same way Kane did, filling the room with blue like the depths of the ocean, drowning out everything but the feeling of depth.

As the trio played, ballads such as “Misty” and “Autumn Leaves” didn’t land with the same feeling and expression as more swinging arrangements like “All the Things You Are”. Duffy took almost all of the solos, leaving Ben and Ken what seemed like table scraps compared to his large servings of frantic neck hammering. But what table scraps were thrown to the other two members of the trio were quickly snapped up and executed with the same soulful passion. The trio ended the short performance with a swinging rendition of ‘Jonny Be Good’ which took me right back to the days of my childhood when my father would play the tune on his classical guitar. All in all, the performance was not a life changing experience, but noteworthy nonetheless.