Can you feel that twinge of jealousy? Well, good. Because we should take a good, hard look at our little sister city to the west and admire its fully functioning jazz festival while we figure out how to get one of our own back in town. What our buddies at the Topeka Jazz Festival have figured out over the past seven years is that talent is the real key to a successful festival. Headlining the opening night Yard Party is rising star Karrin Allyson (see Dig It, page 46), who is joined over the weekend by a mixture of national names (trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, pictured; piano prodigy Eldar Djangirov; and composer and arranger Shelly Berg) thrown in with some of the area's best (Paul Smith, Rod Fleeman and Gerald Spaits, among others) serving as sidemen. Is someone taking notes?
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