As I fidgeted in my seat at the Port Townsend jazz festival, I attempted to devise a metric for measuring my enjoyment of this music form. Would I rather listen to this act, I wondered, or to a cat-stuffed washing machine being shoved down a flight of stairs during the spin cycle?
I settled on this: would I rather listen to this quintet or to the same five guys mowing a lawn at 7am on a Saturday morning?