Sunday jazz in the air

I recently got a tour of the Community School of Music and Arts, the remarkable school-slash-concert hall-slash-museum on San Antonio Circle in Mountain View. It was the kind of afternoon that makes you want to drop everything and learn how to play the bugle.

The fruits of piano lessons trickled out of practice rooms, children happily swirled glops of paint in art classes, and the classy 200-seat Tateuchi Hall was just waiting for a concert or a lecture. I managed to restrain myself from jumping on stage and belting out "Not A Day Goes By."

(No, not the Lonestar version. Geez. Go to your room, Junior.)

For a brief time, I wasn’t caught up in the mechanics of covering the arts: deciding which story to put on the cover, which call to return first, how to shorten one writer’s story and rewrite my own…

It just felt good to be in a building dedicated to arts of all kinds. Creative energy everywhere. Music in the air.

There should be plenty of good music at CSMA this Sunday, when the Alan Broadbent Trio brings jazz to that very stage at Tateuchi Hall at 3 p.m. Besides touring and recording, Broadbent is the musical director for Diana Krall and won a Grammy in 1997 for his arrangement of “When I Fall in Love” for Natalie Cole.

Pictured: Putter Smith, who plays bass for the Alan Broadbent Trio (I liked his picture better than Broadbent’s).