THE NEXT BAND . . . LIVE AT RYLES JAZZ CLUB!

So . . . last night the jazz combo I play in took to the bandstand in one of our 3-times-a-year “battle of the bands” sessions at Ryles Jazz Club in Inman Square in Cambridge. An ensemble housed at the John Payne Music Center in Brookline, we call ourselves The Next Band . . . because that’s who we are at these battles: “the next band” to take the stage . . .

Of course, it’s not really for me to say . . . but that will not stop me from saying it anyway: I think we played a pretty good set—5 tunes that showcase who we are and what we are capable of musically. We led off with “Grooveyard,” a really fine tune—catchy melody, good chord changes for soloing (I’ll take credit for suggesting it!)—penned back in the 1950s by pianist Carl Perkins. We went around the bandstand for solos—Noam on baritone sax, Joe on trumpet, Amelia on piano, yours truly on guitar, Greg on bass—all held together by our guest drummer, Bruce.

With our groove established, we turned the mic over to our vocalist, Julie, for the “North American nightclub debut” of “I Believe in Rhubarb,” a witty love song written by Oren, the brother of our bari player. Noam (on flute), Amelia, and Joe took solos . . . and Oren took a bow!

Then we shifted gears and played “Simone,” a Frank Foster tune written in 3/4 . . . and I guess we performed it in 3/4 too! (I’m pretty sure Amelia chose that one: she likes those jazz waltzes . . .) Joe, Amelia and Greg soloed. . . .

Then we had another vocal feature—Julie silencing the hubbub of conversation in the room with a compelling version of Eden Ahbez's “Nature Boy,” a song introduced to the world by Nat “King” Cole in 1947. We had a nice arrangement, with Greg walking the bass behind Julie for a half chorus before the rest of us joined in. Noam and Joe soloed.

Our closer was a great Lou Donaldson number, “Cookin’” (Joe’s recommendation—lots of dots on the page!). Again we went around the bandstand for solos on this one, and Julie took a turn too with some scat-singing: a rousing finish to a fine set.

I guess that by the time we took the bandstand at 8:10 p.m. as the penultimate combo of a “battle” that started in the afternoon, there were still about 125 people in the audience. Many of them were groupies of our trumpet player, Joe—including his 85-year-old mother who rode a bus all the way from Baltimore just for the occasion! They seemed pleased with what they heard . . . which is more than enough incentive for us to do it all again: in May, I think . . .

THE EARL OF STRATOCASTER . . . AND OTHER MUSICAL NOTES

Somewhere—in a box in the basement, I expect—I still have the bootleg cassette tape that a friend gave me a dozen years ago or more of a Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters recording, Blues Guitar Virtuoso Live in Europe. Sometime in the meantime, I picked up that recording on CD and added it to my iPod. It has some great tunes on it: Freddie King’s “San-Ho-Zay” and “The Stumble,” the jazz anthem “Moanin’” (recorded most famously by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers) . . . and a lot of variations on Earl’s forte, the twelve-bar blues. And I’ve got more Ronnie Earl on my iPod: his albums Healing Time and and The Color of Love and his collaboration with fellow New England guitar slinger Duke Robillard, The Duke Meets the Earl. So I’ve been listening to him a lot and for quite a long time . . . but until this evening I never had a chance to see him perform live. Although he lives in the Boston area, Earl rarely “plays out” . . . and by bad luck or bad timing I’ve missed him the couple of times that he has played in the area in the past year. But the chance was well worth waiting for as he and the Broadcasters certainly did not cheat their audience at the Regent Theater in Arlington—they played for more than two hours non-stop! Mostly it was the blues . . . with variations or inflections: some slow tunes, some burners, a bit of gospel, a bit of jazz. . . . From the opening razor-edged notes on his red Fender Stratocaster, the guitarist had the audience at his mercy: he is an expressive player with a signature Strat sound—at times introspective, at times (as when he wanders off the stage and into the audience as far as his cord will allow) unabashedly extroverted—and the almost-full house lapped it up. While the missus and I agreed that a guest vocalist on a tune or two would have added some variety to this all-instrumental show, we also agreed that his keyboardist—Berklee College of Music professor Dave Limina on Hammond B3 organ and piano—certainly helped to compensate, contributing some brilliant solos as well as utterly sympathetic comping. Providing a rock-solid foundation for those two frontmen, Jim Mouradian on bass and Lorne Entress on drums rounded out the really tight quartet. (Coincidentally, Mouradian was featured in the Boston Globe a week or so ago: he and his son are master guitar makers and repairmen . . .)

Catching a legend like Ronnie Earl “live and in person” reminded me that so far 2009 has been pretty good musically. About a month ago we saw another guitar legend, Pat Martino, play at Scullers Jazz Club, and on Valentine’s night we went to see vocalist Ernestine Anderson at the Regattabar. Each of those shows had its moments, though each fell a bit flat as well. Martino has chops galore, but he plays so fast—even on slow tunes, just furious flurries of notes—that subtlety of expression tends to fall by the wayside. Martino has an interesting story: a couple of decades ago he had a brain aneurysm and lost his guitar memory—he had to relearn his instrument from scratch by listening to his own recordings. . . . Obviously, he has returned to his previous level of mastery . . . with a fury!

Ernestine Anderson has a story too: at 80 years old, she is one of the last links to the golden era of jazz vocalists (she would have come up on the heels of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday). But while she still has the pipes, she was literally invisible to many people in the audience: already diminutive, she sang sitting down on a low chair; with the Regattabar filled to overflowing, there were no sightlines to the low riser that held the chair—that was a bit disappointing. Still . . . we enjoyed being in her presence, especially since her album When the Sun Goes Down has been a constant in our lives for two decades, first on vinyl, then on CD, now on iPod . . .

ROCKY DE VALERA ON YOUTUBE

On my Irish Matters blog, which recycles various of my shorter pieces of published writing (reviews and so on), one post focuses mostly on the Irish retro rock ’n’ roll band Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers, first formed in Dublin early in 1978. Their resurrection late in 2005, almost a quarter-century after the original band had been laid to rest, testifies persuasively to the power of embalming. As further evidence of that power, check out their hot new video, just launched on YouTube. As one waggish commentator has already remarked, this video—filmed on the Hill of Howth—“obviously” alludes to Molly Bloom’s remembrance of that very setting in the “Penelope” episode of Ulysses, which culminates in that most famous of affirmations: “and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” Yes, James Joyce is rockin’ in his grave!

Postscript: 3/11/09:
As if that YouTube commentator’s remarks are not irreverent enough, yesterday’s Irish Times includes a column by Kate Holmquist, the wife—or “band widow,” as she puts it—of the Gravediggers’ pseudo-eponymous leader/vocalist. Styling herself “Mrs. Rocky De Valera,” she has a lot of fun at the expense of “Mr. Holmquist” and his protracted mid-life crisis . . . “which started at the age of 20.” Check it out!

LEWIS ROBINSON'S WATER DOGS: A "MUST-READ"

A few weeks ago I paid a second visit to Newtonville Books (see my earlier post below), drawn there this time by a reading featuring Maine-based fiction writer Lewis Robinson. I first encountered Robinson’s work 6 years ago in the form of a short story, “Officer Friendly,” published in the top-shelf literary journal Tin House. I admired that story so much (actually, I was so envious of it) that I read it aloud in its entirety to my Intro to Creative Writing class as an example of how a tale of adolescent misadventure could transcend its anecdotal simplicity to become a serious and fully-realized work of literature.

I knew that “Officer Friendly” became the title story of Robinson’s first collection of stories, but I didn’t get my hands on that book until the night of his reading in Newtonville. Then I devoured it in less than a next week—at the busy start of a new semester, no less. It’s a really fine gathering of short fiction, and while “Officer Friendly” remains my favorite story by far (I’m still envious!), I was also particularly taken with “Puckheads” and “Finches.”

But Robinson’s main reason for being at Newtonville Books was to promote his first novel—the hot-off-the-press Water Dogs. I expected that I would have to wait a while before even dipping into it. Well, I did wait a couple of weeks . . . but once I picked it up, I didn’t want to put it down (though I had to, occasionally): it is truly one of the most satisfying and gratifying novels I have a read in a long, long time. Part of the satisfaction and gratification involves the pleasure of discovery: although the novel was reviewed very positively in the New York Times Book Review a month or so ago (to avoid the “spoiler effect,” I just glanced at the review), the book still feels “unheralded”—a “gem” just waiting to be unearthed by the lucky reader looking for a new and interesting literary voice.

Not wanting to create a spoiler effect myself, I won’t give away many details about the entanglements of the indelibly etched Littlefield family who are at the center of the narrative—Bennie, his brother William (known mostly by the family surname), their sister Gwen, their semi-detached mother Eleanor, and their father known even by his children as Coach. All I’ll say is that the novel is utterly evocative of the area known as midcoast Maine: the landscape, the characters, and the plot all seem so organically intertwined that it could hardly be set anywhere else. There are some wonderful comic moments, some wonderful poignant moments, and some really sobering moments as well. There are moments of violence and moments of tenderness. But through all the twists and turns of emotional intensity and suspenseful plot, there is a remarkable consistency in the quality of the writing: there is not a false or faulty sentence, paragraph or chapter in the entire book. (And this showed during Robinson’s reading at Newtonville Books—the novel unfolds altogether naturally, as if in the voice of a man speaking . . .)

I know that it’s still relatively early in 2009. But I’ll be hard-pressed to find another book this year that pleases me as much as Water Dogs. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

YESTERDAY . . . LAST NIGHT

Way back in November, on Thanksgiving Eve, the missus and I took a little road trip across our town line into the sprawling Boston suburb of Dedham . . . specifically to a truly nondescript watering hole called Rick’s Pub. From the outside it looked like it could be a bikers bar, though there were no “bikes” to be seen. And inside there were no known bikers to be seen either among the rather thin (not to be confused with slim) crowd. Feeling conspicuous enough entering what appeared to be a rough-and-tumble milieu (“milieu”—a word probably never before used to describe that joint), we were made to feel even more so when the live music stopped as we stepped inside the door and a voice announced over the speaker system: “Well, the riff-raff just arrived . . .” Not easily taken aback, I asked the missus: “Does the singer in the band know us?”

Well, it turns out it wasn’t the singer’s voice that welcomed us into that world so irreverently—it belonged to the rhythm guitarist (and occasional soloist—see below), an old friend who was the real magnet drawing us out of ourselves and into that hole-in-the-wall. We go back almost 30 years with Chris . . . so aptly enough the band he plays in is named “Yesterday”—and the music they play is “classic rock”: hits mostly from the ’60s and ’70s. (As it turns out, we also go back quite a few years with the drummer, Dan—and even further with his wife, Vicki, a student of mine 23 years ago: it was an added treat to see her that evening . . .) “Yesterday” covers an impressive range of bands: The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream (and other Clapton-centric configurations), the Kinks, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Paul Revere and the Raiders . . . and whatever the fella at the end of the bar is having. And they cover them well. The whole evening was . . . “classic”; but for us the musical highlight was Chris’s marvelous note-for-note rip-off of Eric Clapton’s searing solo on the Yardbirds’ version of “Ain’t Got You”: utterly smokin’! (When we got home I even jacked up the original on my iPod so my daughters could be impressed with Chris in absentia . . .)

But . . . did I describe that visit to Rick’s Pub as a “road trip”? Maybe I should have said “field trip”—as in Sociology 101. The first lesson of the evening occurred immediately when, belly up to the bar, I received a supercilious response from the barman when I requested a Guinness: “supercilious” and “Guinness,” two more words probably never before used with reference to Rick’s Pub. So we settled on a couple of Buds . . . possibly the best (certainly the coldest) bottles of beer we’ve ever had. The lessons continued after we took our seats “down front,” right at the edge of the makeshift dance floor, and found ourselves quite literally part of the sideshow of happily tipsy women (of every age, size and shape) gyrating around that small space. (The very few men in the place hit the floor only for the slow dances.) At more than one point I was sure I was going to be lap-danced by a blonde with a gold bellybutton-ring and an interesting tattoo across her lower back. . . . As it turns out, we were also quite literally part of the main show as we quickly discovered that the band’s sound man, who was set up at a table right behind us, also plays tambourine and sings background vocals: now, that's what I call "surround sound"! Anyway, we enjoyed ourselves immensely, though as we were driving home, I said to the missus: “I am truly at a loss for words” to describe the overall experience—the setting, the people, the motley crew of the band. I’m still mostly at a loss for words!

But that didn’t stop us from slipping out to Rick’s Pub last night to see “Yesterday” again. And again it was fun: this time Chris’s wife Kathy was there, along with Dan’s wife Vicki—as I said to Dan during one of the breaks, at least I can claim the evening as a “date” with my wife: I doubt that, being married to boys in the band, either Vicki or Kathy would think that way about their night out! The crowd was even thinner (again, not slimmer) this time and no one graced the dance floor during the two sets we heard. But the vibe was still in the room . . . for now. Alas, rumor has it that Rick’s Pub has been sold and will become a “Wings” franchise within a couple of weeks. I wonder if the finger-lickin’ patrons of that joint will hear an echo of The Beatles tune that I assume lent “Yesterday” its name: “Now I need a place to hide away, Oh, I believe in yesterday . . .”