Photography by Kenneth Coles
“Everyone do us a favor. Take out your smartphones, call the person next to you and put them on speaker. Then put the phones together, ying and yang or 69 style.” The cellist of Tall Heights told the crowd, “Make music with us.”
The packed Ogden theatre felt like a small intimate venue while Tall Heights played and it stayed that way once Ben Folds took the stage.
With his piano set center stage, Ben drew the crowd in with familiar fan favorites and comical anecdotes. Before intermission, he deligated to the audience to collect a paper from his table in the back and write down songs they would like him to play when he returned to the stage. But before he left to take a short break he gave everyone one more song and surprised everyone with live assembly and jam on a drum set that had been stashed around the stage.
Before he returned a man dressed in an elf costume holding two red flashing lights commanded the crowd to fold their papers into airplanes and throw them to the stage on the count of 10. At one well over one hundred paper airplanes soared through the air landing on the stage. Ben returned to the stage and began picking the pieces of paper up 1 by 1 and began playing the first 10 songs he saw on the pages.
It was a memorable show filled with new music as well as old favorites that got the crowd cheering.
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