When Fresh Coast Jazz Festival founder Carl Brown booked musician Eric Essix for his festival this year, he had a request that his band play a show for a special audience beforehand– the patients of Children’s Wisconsin.
This is the fourth year Brown has brought one of the festival acts to play a free show for patients and their families on the hospital’s plaza. This year, Essix and his contemporary jazz band showed up a day early for the show at Children’s on Thursday. While the Fresh Coast Jazz Festival took place at the Pabst Theater this weekend, was founded in 2019 and featured performances this year by Spyro Gyra, Jonathan Butler and Kandace Springs, among others.
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Brown’s inspiration for Jazz on the Plaza Concert for the Kids at Children’s comes from a tough moment.
“I lost my dad to cancer and one of the last conversations he had with me was about thinking of others,” Brown said, dressed in a sharp purple suit coat. “My dad introduced me to jazz, it was his favorite pastime, so after talking to my wife and praying about it, my wife came up with the idea that we should do a jazz fest and have the proceeds go to charity.”
Leslie Scott, a Child Life Specialist at Children’s Wisconsin, explains that a show like the one in the plaza gives the families an often much needed moment of normalcy.
“I think one of the best things we can do here at the hospital is to help emulate some of the activities kids and their families are missing out on when they’re stuck in the hospital,” Scott said. “It’s the end of summer; everyone is trying to soak in those last outdoor concerts and fairs.”
Jazz on the Plaza, with live music, lemonade, popcorn, care packages and other swag donated by event sponsor Horicon Bank, brings the festival experience to the patients so they can take a break “before they have to go back to their rooms and do some of those really hard things in a better way,” Scott said.
Nearby, a group of a dozen or so patients started to arrive. Some of them draw on the plaza with sidewalk chalk; a foam football is tossed to a patient in a wheelchair. For those that can’t make it outside, Brown points out a camera in front of the band, explaining that the show is simulcast to all the hospital rooms.
Other programming and special events Scott helps coordinate includes a winter carnival, a mini-Christmas tree farm and a teddy bear event every March.
“It’s my whole job to figure out ways to help kids cope with the stress of being in the hospital,” Scott said, explaining that when the kids cope better, the parents– and staff– do as well.
A guitar crescendo intertwines with a riffing saxophone as the band gives a smooth cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely.”
“I think music certainly has healing properties, too,” Brown said. “Life is hard sometimes, so just smiling or saying hello to someone can really have an impact on a person’s day or life, you never know what someone’s going through.”
