If Zinger Was a Bandleader in Vegas

Last night, The Madame and I took a hot tip from Ed the Drummer and headed down to the Golden Nugget to see the Lon Bronson All-Star Band at midnight. Word on the street was that some of the guys from Tower of Power (who don't have a decent website for me to link to, damn them) were going to sit in with Bronson's team and light up the night.

Here's the deal: anybody who digs live music and who is in town at midnight on a Saturday is getting dragged down to the Nugget to see these guys with us. You cannot possibly imagine how tight the band is, and how extremely happening their sound is. Six horns, three singers, two drummers, a guitar, bass, and piano make up the finest band I've ever seen playing live. Seriously, those of you out there who are into this kind of music -- you know who you are -- are going to go and see these guys when you blow into town.

And besides how phenomenal the band was by itself, there was a squeedly versus meedley altissimo sax battle that was waged between the tenor player from Bronson's band and the tenor player from Tower of Power. A brief note for the sax-heads in the crowd: it was an all-black, sparkling Yamaha Custom pitted against an ancient, no-lacquer-left Mark VI... I wet myself with glee. These guys were both off the chain and out of the box.

And besides all that, Lon Bronson himself looks the way I picture El Zinga the Mexican Outlaw looking if he became a serious Soul Man and put together a horn band in Las Vegas, complete with scraggly goatee and yellow-tinted onstage sunglasses. If this post seems a little disjointed, it's only because I'm really at a loss to describe how good this band was. If you come and see them, you'll see what I mean.