I strolled into Basin’s Art Mine without my questions.
I’d prepared a notebook full of them: how to make jazz accessible, what draws musicians to rural communities, queries about instruments and craft. But somewhere on the drive from Boulder I decided to leave them in the car. I wanted only to listen.
Jazz is built on a structure: a theme stated plainly early on, then pulled apart, taken somewhere unexpected and changed by the journey. These three pieces from the Art Mine’s Mar. 17 show stayed with me. And I hope you’ll bear with me if I wander as I recount them, much like the musicians behind their creation.
Up on stage, Devon Gates was on bass, Naomi Moon Siegel on trombone, Owen Ross on guitar and Chris Acaciano on drums. Around 40 people filled the cushioned chairs, and as the curtains were drawn and the lights turned low the room hummed with an excited murmur. After the musicians were thanked for making the trip, Siegel smiled and leaned into the mic.
“It’s really a treat to be back playing in this room,” she said. “I love the way it sounds in here.”
She was right. When Ross’s guitar came in alone on the first piece, “Prairie Isolation,” the sound filled the room in a way I hadn’t expected. And when the other instruments joined, it arrived like a wave. Ross led the piece, his guitar unhurried and deliberate, setting something in motion. I closed my eyes, and let my mind wander.
I was a jackrabbit first, small and quick, scuttling through dry brush under a wide open sky, the heat pressing down. Then I was an old cowboy, dusty and unhurried, pushing through the door of a saloon at the end of a long day, letting the cool dark swallow me. Then I was myself, on a porch I don’t own yet, watching the sun go down over land that stretched further than I could see. A moment of stillness before everything else arrived.
The drums joined, then the trombone, then the bass, each one finding its place, with so much conversation between them – and all without words. I had never sat and truly listened to jazz before, and this was one of my first thoughts: how much was being said, how little of it required language. The music found its way back to where it started, the guitar again, and I surfaced slowly.
Four pieces followed. As I listened, I watched how each musician connected with their instrument, each one an extension of themselves. Ross’s guitar bent at the will of the music, his eyes half closed, effortless and in a state of bliss. Acaciano on drums barely glanced at his kit, his arms moving in an almost ballet-like manner, music and movement flowing down the arm and out the wrist. Siegel’s trombone fell when the music fell and rose when it rose, moving with her ear, her head, her shoulder, her arm. Gates bit her lip as she played, fingers floating across the bass, a look of deep focus breaking now and then into a smile.
One piece put me in a bustling city cafe, then took me through busy streets, navigating seas of bodies and movement, sounds carried on pavement and down alleys, the heartbeat of a place full of living things becoming louder.
Another opened with Gates singing, and suddenly I was in a sun-drenched kitchen, feeling the weight of womanhood, and the hardship, love, grief, creation and acceptance that comes with it. At the end, Gates answered Siegel’s trombone with her voice, and together they became the center of the piece, two women in conversation, passing understanding back and forth.
Gates introduced the next piece, inspired by an Octavia Butler essay on predicting the future. One of the rules from that essay? Count on surprises.
From the moment “Count on Surprises” began, I found myself holding my breath, perched on the edge of my seat. That was the theme of it, I suppose, knowing something was coming but not knowing what. This one was punchier, more insistent than what had come before. Where “Prairie Isolation” had placed me gently into the landscape, this one consumed me.
I was no longer a passenger being guided somewhere. I was the river of notes itself, traveling from place to place, building to building, bouncing off every surface I could find. There was agency in the music, a destination implied, though what or where it was remained unclear. Every note felt individual, like a tiptoe on a creaking floor, each one its own small event, or miracle.
Siegel was extraordinary here. Her additions were the ones that felt the most like surprises, maybe because the trombone has the ability to punch through a space in a split second, unexpectedly, and she used that.
Then the piece ended, and not gradually or gently. It was simply there and then it wasn’t, the music gone as suddenly as it had arrived. I exhaled. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath.
A special guest came to the stage, Basin’s own MJ Williams, world-class trombonist and vocalist, who the room clearly knew and loved. The applause said everything. Gates and Williams spent time scatting and harmonizing, glances passing briefly between them sharing love and respect for the craft. A warm rendition of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” followed, and when it ended, Siegel asked: “Do you guys want one more?” She was met with cheers.
Before the final piece, Siegel told a story. She and Gates met through a program called Mutual Mentorship for Musicians in 2022, where they were randomly paired and wrote music together over Zoom during the pandemic. They only performed live for the first time last year, and now here they both were, in Basin.
The last piece was their collaboration, Siegel’s music, Gates’ lyrics. It was called “Welcome to This World.” I leaned forward. I wanted to hear what two musicians like this could build together.
The piece opened with Gates’ voice, unaccompanied. “And first we come to see it through such childlike eyes,” she sang, and then, a little later, “luster fades with time.” Two lines, and the whole weight of a life was in them.
When the instruments came in, they carried that weight forward, moving through something vast and real: the wonder of arriving in the world, and what it costs to stay in it. Disappointment and wonder and acceptance, not in sequence but all at once, the way life tends to deliver them.
Then I noticed it. A single silk thread dangling from the ceiling, catching the light, a small spider on the end of it, inching its way upwards. I watched it for a moment, this tiny creature going about its business, hanging in the balance of the world just like the rest of us.
As the piece came to a close, I felt tears springing in my eyes. I hoped the spider could hear the music, understand it somehow.
Welcome to the world, tiny one.
