The Hot Club of Las Vegas performs at a vaccination clinic at the Las Vegas Convention Center Saturday, April 24, 2021. The entertainment is part of the “Create Our Recovery” concert series.
Friday, April 30, 2021 | 2 a.m.
Visitors to the COVID-19 vaccine clinic at the Las Vegas Convention Center might find themselves tapping their toes and nodding their heads in the post-shot observation area.
Thanks to a grant and a desire to brighten necessary but spartan spaces, local performers are finding audiences at Las Vegas-area shot clinics. For some, it’s their first paid gig since the pandemic strangled live shows more than a year ago.
Arturo Valadez-Sanchez didn’t have live entertainment when he got his COVID-19 shots a few weeks ago. Good thing he decided to accompany his adult nephew to the convention center last week for the younger man’s vaccination.
“My grandfather was a trombone player in a big band, so I love this kind of music,” he said as he took in a performance by the Gamboa Jazz Trio.
Clinic administrator Jon Klassen, who also oversees the mega-clinic at the Cashman Center, said he wanted people waiting in line and in the observation areas to have more to see and hear than their phones — especially because they might be there voluntarily, but not for fun. Wait times are typically 15 minutes, but can stretch to 30 minutes for certain risk factors such as allergies.
“While there’s a lot of humanity in there, it’s just kind of sterile,” he said.
Klassen considered piping in recorded music, but he wanted “real” music — live performers. Except Klassen is a firefighter by trade, not a concert promoter. For a wider network, he reached out to Sarah O’Connell.
O’Connell promotes local independent artists all day long as the executive director of the community Henderson Symphony Orchestra, the vice president of the Producers Alliance of Southern Nevada, artistic director for The Asylum Theatre and the founder of Eat More Art Vegas.
But when Klassen first reached out, they had no budget, and “I didn’t want to ask people to work for nothing,” O’Connell said.
Destiny was on their side, though, as one of Klassen’s employees won $2,500 in a contest that required him to donate the prize to charity. He gave the cash to the Henderson Symphony Orchestra, which paid a pair of strings players to perform at Cashman in March. It went well, as did a follow-up performance by the local Mariachi Nuestras Raices, so a motivated O’Connell reached out to the private sector-oriented COVID-19 Response, Relief and Recovery Task Force with a request for $50,000.
She promptly got the money, and last weekend kicked off the Create Our Recovery concert series.
“This was one of those meant-to-be projects,” O’Connell said.
The bands will play over six weeks at the convention center. They will also play Saturday and May 4 at Cashman Center, which will close its vaccination site May 5. Performers earn $150 an hour for 90-minute to two-hour slots, plus tips.
The eclectic lineup ranges from bluegrass to jazz to body percussion. The Henderson Symphony Orchestra and mariachi will be back, too.
O’Connell said the days she spent booking gigs were special, bringing a light into some dim days in Vegas’ substantial creative economy that extends far beyond the Strip. She said the arts are “the water that touches every island” here.
Klassen saw how music makes connections when Mariachi Nuestras Raices first played Cashman. An elderly man approached the youthful band members, requested a song, and then sang it with them.
Klassen, touched, asked a passerby what he thought of the impromptu set within a set.
“‘That sounds like happiness,’” he recalled the man saying.
The convention center clinic last weekend was the Gamboa Jazz Trio’s first gig together. Their next was the following Tuesday, also at the convention center and a few paces from the “I took my shot” selfie station.
Sergio Gamboa, the trio’s namesake, played the keyboard while friends and fellow UNLV students played the upright bass and drums. He admitted that it was an unusual first gig, but he was happy to be playing, and seeing people get vaccinated. “I’ll take it,” he said.
The next band up, the gypsy jazz quartet Hot Club of Las Vegas, kept Christopher Cardenas in his seat while his 1-year-old daughter Carmen Faye, born during the lockdown, danced at his feet.
“I don’t want to leave,” Cardenas said before dropping a $5 bill into an open guitar case. “It’s a party in here.”
