I spent an hour this afternoon at Bridge Square, listening to the Ameriikan Poijat (Boys of America), an amazing brass septet based here in Northfield (and headed by a music professor at St. Olaf). Performing as part of this weekend's very cool Vintage Band Festival, the Poijat played a wide variety of Finnish and Finnish-American music: a number of marches and waltzes, a couple schottisches, and the odd polka and polonaise, as well as one wonderful tango. Though I don't know much about those kinds of music, I found every piece to be very beautiful, even those that, like the tango, featured a subtle but distinctly Finnish(-American) sense of mournfulness. This quiet, sad, wintry mood was quite at odds with the suffocating heat and humidity, but it made me helped me imagine that my grandpa and grandma, when they weren't much older than me in the 1930s, might have heard pieces like these performed by a band like the Poijat at a concert in north Ironwood, Michigan. The thought made me happy.
Blowing & Drifting
Forecast: Significant blowing and drifting, with the possibility of heavy accumulation in rural areas.
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email: christopher at tassava dot com