At the end of the evening, conductors of the two big bands that provided most of the evening's entertainment invited any NEA Jazz Master in the audience to come up on stage and play along. While hearing legends like Latin jazz king Paquito D'Rivera was a real treat and the level of excellence and creativity borne from decades of practice and performance was obvious, I thought that a 10-year old trumpet player that snuck up on stage and was given a shot at the mic stole the show. Not only did he play great but it was clear that he would have been happy to play all night long ... one of the bandleaders literally took the instrument out of his hands to give the rest of the masters some minutes!
As the two bands played with a host of masters (there were probably 40+ musicians on stage by the end of the night), I turned to Marty Ashby, Executive Producer of MCG Jazz (an Accelerator venture), and pointed out how the actions on stage represented much of what companies around the world will need more of the in the future -- creativity, improvisation, teamwork, individual mastery, respected leadership, joy, passion, enthusiasm ...
Hmm, now if you could just bottle that up and get it out to the masses ...
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