Antonio Hart Blew Comstock Hall

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I posted to my facebook page Friday night that Holly Brockman-Johnson let Antonio Hart play sax for her tonight.

That, he did.

Hart was in the ‘ville for UL’s annual Jazz Week.

A last minute opportunity to interview him was presented to me so I hopped in the car with a friend who was driving him to and fro.

Antonio Hart is cute.

He wore a knit cap, cool glasses, an Eddie Bauer scarf … and the man, he’s skittish.

I didn’t ask him too many deep, personal questions but that skittishness gave way to caution and then before we both knew it, he was offering commentary on where schools are where they are today and thank goodness they were where they were in the mid-late 1970s when the high school he’d planned to go to dropped their music program. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have enrolled in a Baltimore performing arts school and he wouldn’t have been challenged.  He might have been the sax player he is today, but it just would have happened a different way.

So, here’s the skinny: He was initially influenced by Grover Washington, Jr.; sheesh, right?  If he’d said Kenny G, I might have gotten out of the moving car. What’s great about Hart is that he didn’t apologize at all and he appreciates all the music that’s around him.  He talked about the other musicians like Kenny G. and how he’s played with them and learned from them.

Many literary snobs cast off Belva Plain of bodice-ripper fame and John Grisham but when it comes down to it, at least people are reading, right?

Antonio Hart blew that horn Friday night. And he blew up Comstock Hall!  Kids were recording him on their iTouch’s and there wasn’t a peep in the house except from a friend who was whispering each song’s significance to him when Hart didn’t. Having seen enough Jazz to know most of it is rarely consumed without drinks or conversation all over it, I was delighted that the place was full, it was rockin and it was without words from the audience.

He played Ellington, Coltrane and Davis …  He played Stars Fall on Alabama … he played Like Sonny Rollins … he played Lotus Blossom …  but he was a different guy when he played Hart – his own compositions.  One dedicated to his Godson was as soft and subtle as it was screaming and filling the hall.

Even though I was sitting in the second row, I could feel the head bobs and the heel taps from all over the hall and in the balcony. There were old people and young’ins and not one of them still.