Nakia Madry performs with the Fuzz Band at the Jazz Festival at the Hampton Coliseum. To see our name in lights amongst all of those people was really a highlight. From the time I’ve been coming to Hampton, I’ve always seen that sign with all the big names on it. I think the most exciting part was seeing our name on that big sign on Mercury Boulevard when you turn in to the Coliseum. We were supposed to play for 15 minutes, but that was the year Maze was running late so we probably got to play 25 minutes or so. We wanted to have fun, and we did all originals. We put together like a 15- or 16-piece band, with a tuba and a full horn section and two percussionists. We had played at the Capital Jazz Fest and the North Carolina Jazz Fest, but we had to wait to play at the one in our home. That’s when we got to play at the festival. I think it eventually came to pass because Joe Tsao worked out at the YMCA where me and my wife worked out, and people would come up to us and say, “Oh, your band is amazing,” or “Hey, I saw your band.” Joe was there, and I think he got to wondering about the band and he looked into us. I said, “For what?” He said he’d heard about the jazz festival. One year one of my friends called me, who knew somebody on the board, and he congratulated me. So I said, “Man, why don’t you play like that live?” And he said, “People want to hear the record, with the songs sounding the way they sound on the record.”ĭuane Smith of The Fuzz Band (2010): I believe we had been recommended a couple times before it actually came to fruition. But as Kenny G? If he played like that, it would make a lot of jazz purists raise their eyebrows. I mean, I’d heard him with the Jeff Lorber Fusion back in the 1970s, back when he was still Kenny Gorelick. If people could hear this guy playing this horn like that … because he doesn’t play that way live. It leads me to a dressing room, and on that door, it says “Kenny G.” First thing I thought is, “Kenny must have a different horn player in the band.” The door was ajar, so I went in, and there was Kenny, in the corner, facing the wall with his back to me, just killing it on the tenor sax, man. And I thought, “Who is playing that horn like that?” So I venture out and I head toward that sound. Jae Sinnett: You want to know a funny thing I remember? I was in my dressing room (as a performer in 1988) and I hear this smokin’ saxophone.
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