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Don't worry that you inadvertently missed the annual Salt Lake Jazz Festival, which in the past took over Washington Square during the height of summer.
The festival showcasing local and nationally touring jazz musicians, now in its 12th year, has gone through two moves this year, said Jerry Floor, festival director and cofounder with former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson.
The festival has moved to the Saturday and Sunday of Labor Day weekend, with educational clinics at the University of Utah on Saturday, and afternoon and evening performances on Sunday. In a cost-cutting move, the festival's performance day will be at the Gallivan Center instead of the park around City Hall. The Gallivan Center was $22,000 cheaper than holding it at Washington Square, Floor said.
Headliners are Deana Martin, the daughter of the late, great Dean Martin, and the Oakland-based Tower of Power, celebrating more than 40 years of horn-heavy R&B.
For this performance, Martin will be reunited with Vincent Falcone, former music director for her father's Rat Park comrade Frank Sinatra. Falcone will conduct the Salt Lake City Jazz Orchestra during Martin's performance of her father's most well-known songs. "I've known Vinny for a very long time," she said from her home in Branson, Mo., where she can also see family friend Andy Williams' home across the golf course. "Any place I go, if I am with Vinny, I know he has my back," she said.
Besides being on the road 280 days a year to perform, she is working with actors Bonnie Hunt and Joe Mantegna on adapting her 2005 memoir Memories Are Made of This into a film.
Martin already has ideas about who might portray her in the movie. When she was performing at the legendary Feinstein's at Loews Regency in New York City last year, Martin talked to the crowd about the film. If she had her choice, she told the...