I had a pretty active weekend for once, and I thought parts of it were worth sharing. On Saturday we went to see KFOG Kaboom, which this year featured Kathleen Edwards, The John Butler Trio, and The Wallflowers. The music was decent, in particular I enjoyed the John Butler Trio – they’re very creative and obviously skilled musicians. The Wallflowers were blah, but I hadn’t realized just how many hits they churn out. That’s a skill in and of itself.

The real highlight of the festival, though, was the fireworks display (wmv, 68mb). Between all the folks in my group, we’d seen fireworks in San Francisco, Oakland, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Paris, London, etc… but none of them came even close to matching this display. I saw about 5 things I didn’t even know they could do with fireworks! The show went on for about 15 minutes and we were all absolutely blown away. I highly recommend you all go see this next year, especially since it’s entirely free.

On Sunday we also went to Yoshi’s to see Bill Evans and an all-star band that included Bela Fleck (banjo), Vinnie Colaiuta (percussion), Jimmy Haslip (bass) & Darol Anger (fiddle). I was particularly excited to see Bela, who I love on his solo albums with the Flecktones, but it turned out that Darol Anger was the star of the show. That guy is fantastic. Overall, it was a decent show, but a bit more free form than I was hoping for. When a bunch of ridiculously talented musicians get together like that, you’re bound to have a good show, but we were glad when they finished up with Bela’s Outbound because it was the only song they played all night that anyone had been playing for longer than a week.