The mansion’s front lawn at Old Westbury Gardens filled with music enthusiasts and a certain photographer on a mercifully humidity- and mosquito-free summer evening last Wednesday.
Baby Soda, a Brooklyn-based band that bills its genre as “street jazz swing,” mostly performed New Orleans-style and “Stardust”-type tunes at the garden’s Picnic Pops summer concerts. The ensemble consists of drums, vocals, banjo/guitar, and one-string box bass, as well as a trio that played various brass and wind instruments, including trumpet, trombone, saxophone, tuba and clarinet.
Thankfully, I was allowed to move freely with my camera around the bandstand. And so I got close to the musicians and produced some zoomed-in, tight images, of the guitarist plucking his strings, the drummer striking his snare, the singer gleefully channelling Billie Holiday, all as a setting sun gave way to soft red and blue stage lighting.
For information on Baby Soda, visit the band’s website at www.babysoda.org.