SUMMER READING LIST . . .

IT TAKES AN AWFULLY BIG MAN . . .

. . . to overshadow my wife!

(And an awfully brave man to post a photo of it?)

A TALE OF TWO SEATINGS . . .

Okay, I’ll resist the temptation of saying “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—in largest part because I would be lying. We enjoyed both of the Red Sox games we attended over the weekend. In fact, getting to go to two games in a three-day period was more than “double the pleasure, double the fun”!

On Friday night the Sox beat the Oakland Athletics 8-6. My wife and two of our daughters and I had the game marked on the calendar from early in the week, and I ordered tickets once I knew that we would have “baseball weather.” Or so we thought. We thought that we dressed warmly enough for a night game in early June, but a brisk sea-breeze made us think otherwise pretty quickly. A bad night at the ballpark may still be better than a good day at work—and this wasn’t even a bad night as the Sox got back on track and rallied from the 4-run hole they dug for themselves in the first inning—but we were sitting on our hands and shivering for a good part of the evening. I never thought I’d have a hot chocolate on top of a beer—at a ballgame, no less—but so it went, especially high up in the bleachers: section 38, row 36 . . . just about as far from home plate as you could sit.

But what a difference two days can make. Sunday afternoon was still a bit breezy and cool, especially in the shade . . . but for that game my wife and I had it “made in the shade.” About two hours before game time our across-the-street neighbor rang the doorbell and offered us a pair of tickets for the Pavilion at Fenway Park, a seating area we never even knew existed. With neighbors like that who needs a sugar mama or a sugar daddy? . . . Well, I’ll let the photo tell this tale: from where we sat, in the third row of a luxury deck directly above home plate, we could almost read the names on the lineup cards being delivered to the umpires during the pregame ritual! And the seats came with waiter service from a full bar menu. And oh yes, the Sox won 6-3 to complete a 3-game sweep of the A's: maybe it was the best of times after all . . .

“GIRLS” AND THEIR GUITARS

A few weeks ago I found myself seated at a dinner beside a woman who, in the course of our casual conversation, revealed that several decades ago she had been a serious guitar student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Doing the math in my head, I wondered—and then I asked—whether she had attended Berklee around the same time as the somewhat legendary Emily Remler, whose promising career ended with her early death, in 1990 (she was 32 years old), from a drug overdose. The woman I was seated next to had indeed known Remler personally and was pleased that I knew of her . . . and was surprised to learn that I even have one of her CDs, East to Wes. It is a fine recording altogether, showing off Remler’s impressive chops on tunes like “Daahoud,” “Hot House,” and the Wes Montgomery-inflected “Blues for Herb.” Here’s a great video of her playing “Tenor Madness” in Australia the year before her death.

In her time Remler was something of an iconoclast, a rare female axe-slinger in the very male world of jazz guitar. Her mentor Herb Ellis predicted that she would be “the new superstar of guitar.” Remler herself hoped that her legacy would include “memorable guitar playing and my contributions as a woman in music,” though she added: “the music is everything, and it has nothing to do with politics or the women’s liberation movement.” Ultimately, she was right: her playing did not break down any barriers (for some reason there are still very few women making noise on jazz guitar), but her music lives on.

Ditto—in part—for a woman guitar player who preceded Remler onto the bandstand by about 40 years. Mary Osborne resented being cast as mainly a “woman guitarist”: inspired by seeing Charlie Christian play with Al Trent’s band in Bismarck, ND (a year or so before he joined Benny Goodman’s band and became a legend), she committed herself to swinging in his wake (quite literally—for a while she even played a Gibson ES-150 guitar identical to Christian’s). Eventually moving to New York, she recorded with true jazz giants Dizzy Gillespie and Coleman Hawkins . . . but during the prime of her career she recorded only one album under her own name, A Girl and Her Guitar, in 1959. While the title might have a novelty ring to it, the music on board could not be farther from a commercial sell-out: in fact, it is one of the most satisfyingly swinging albums I’ve heard in a long, long time. Backed by Tommy Flanagan on piano, Jo Jones on drums, Tommy Potter on bass and Daniel Barker on rhythm guitar, Osborne soars through 10 jazz classics (including “I Love Paris,” “How High the Moon,” “I Found a New Baby” and “These Foolish Things”) and one original blues. Her playing is striking—she is wielding a beautiful Gretsch “White Falcon”—and the album is a classic, which makes it that much more a pity that it has never been released as a CD (I paid big bucks on eBay for a copy of the original vinyl recording).

Odds and ends of recordings by Osborne are available on jazz guitar compilations like Hittin’ on All Six and Swing To Bop Guitar: Guitars In Flight 1939- 1947. And there’s a terrific, albeit blurry, video clip of her playing on a television program, Art Ford’s Jazz Party. Maybe someday A Girl and Her Guitar will be reissued and her playing will live on for a wider audience like Emily Remler’s does.

LIVE AT SCULLERS . . . CATHERINE RUSSELL

Sometimes it’s good to be led into temptation . . . and to succumb. Last night, my wife and I couldn’t resist the lure of a new-to-us jazz singer in town, so we trekked out to Scullers jazz club to catch Catherine Russell live and in person. What a treat! We had first heard of her in a write-up in the Boston Globe last week, but a number of people in the audience seemed familiar with her already and she certainly rose to the anticipation that filled the room. A small woman with a big voice and high-energy stage presence, she delivered a wonderful performance of songs that my wife aptly described as being from “the anti-songbook.” That is, rather than perform indisputable “classics” by Gershwin, Porter, et al., she chose mostly lesser-known songs that were yet recorded by well-known leading ladies of jazz and blues whom she channeled brilliantly—Ella Fitzgerald, Alberta Hunter, Maxine Sullivan, Mary Lou Williams—while also adding her own interpretive touches. Her selections included several cuts from her latest CD, Inside This Heart of Mine—the title tune, “As Long as I Live,” “Close Your Eyes,” and “We the People”—plus a number of other obscure gems that she dusted off and polished up. On most of the tunes on the CD, she is backed by horns, but last night she had just a drummerless trio—Mark Shane on piano, Lee Hudson on bass, and the estimable Mark Munisteri on guitar and six-string banjo. They provided plenty of support for a vocalist who owned the room from the moment she stepped onto the bandstand.

DAYTRIPPERS . . .

When we pulled out of our just-south-of-Boston driveway on Saturday morning at 7:20, the GPS gave our ETA for the heart of New York City as 11:00. Not for the first time, my wife and I asked each other why we don’t make the trip more often: neither one of us had a really good answer. . . .

The trip down was remarkably easy . . . though not quite as easy as the GPS promised, as traffic on FDR Drive was crawling after we got to the edge of Manhattan. Still, we made it to the Museum of Modern Art by 11:30 . . . and we even found on-street parking! MoMA was our only goal for the day—we wanted to see the exhibit titled Picasso’s Guitars, 1912-14. As anyone knows who has scouted around in his enormous body of work across various media and various “periods” over more than half a century, Picasso had many obsessions: nude women . . . picadors . . . guitars. . . . As its title suggests, the current exhibit emphasizes his particular fixation with guitars at a particular point in his career. It is centered around two sculptures of guitars—one in cardboard, one in sheet metal—in the company of various other guitar-focused cubist-oriented collages, sketches, and paintings that the artist created in his studios in Paris and in the south of France just before the outbreak of the Great War. Comprising thirty-some pieces, the exhibit could obviously be summarized in aptly musical terms as “variations on a theme” . . . but in many respects it defies summary: this was that odd case where the whole was equal to the sum of its parts—each piece was intriguingly Picasso-esque in its own right, and the overall exhibit left this visitor staggered by the match of visual imagination and physical execution that I suppose is Picasso’s signature.

After viewing that exhibit, we wandered around MoMA for a while—standing in awe before one modern masterpiece after another . . . including Picasso’s “Three Musicians,” which I always find bigger than I expect it to be. Incidentally, on Friday night, whetting our appetite for MoMA, we went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and I was surprised (not for the first time) at the small size of John Singer Sargent’s painting of the Pasdeloup Orchestra.

Speaking of appetites being whetted, after leaving MoMA we decided on a whim to find a bite to eat . . . in Brooklyn. We had never been there before, so to remove some of the randomness from our driving around in a borough that if it were a city unto itself would be the fourth-largest in the U.S., we punched into our GPS the words Blue Bottle Coffee, the name of a sister shop to a café we had visited in San Francisco in January, and that took us to the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn. It is a funky neighborhood with lots of shops and eateries catering to its predominantly twenty-something denizens. We had a nice mid-afternoon lunch at Juliette, by far the most popular place around . . .

Then we hit the road back to Boston . . . though with a “Why not?” detour down to legendary Coney Island—which proved to be less of a “destination” than we expected. That diversion got us stuck in some really heavy traffic as we tried to make our way back toward I-95. Still, we made it back to Boston before 11:00 p.m. Not a bad daytrip. We’ll do it again . . .

B-ING THERE: PRICELE$$!

I had a flashback a few nights ago to a transporting moment in sports history: the night in 1988 when my beloved Boston Bruins defeated the Montreal Canadiens in a playoff series for the first time in 45 years. I was living in South Boston at the time and didn’t have cable TV, so part of my flashback involves watching the game at the L Street Tavern. That was almost a decade before that local watering hole would become a made-over tourist destination in the wake of being featured in the Matt Damon-Ben Affleck vehicle Good Will Hunting. I lived only a couple of blocks away, on East 6th Street, but I was not a regular—and everyone there knew it on the very few occasions when I stopped in for a cold Bud. The place was the antithesis (probably not a word spoken there very often!) of the legendary Cheers bar downtown, where supposedly “Everybody knows your name”: clearly, I was an outsider and was looked upon with deep suspicion. . . . Anyway, one funny memory I have of the night the Bruins finally ousted the Habs in ’88 involves the locals toasting Bruins player Billy O’Dwyer, a native son of Southie, by singing at the television screen some lines from the mid-70s anti-war pop song “Billy, Don’t be a Hero” . . .

But last night, sitting belly up to a bar was not going to satisfy my thirst for the ecstasy of victory! By my calculation, I have been a diehard Bruins fan for at least 47 years—ever since my hometown hero Forbie Kennedy suited up for the Black and Gold back in 1964. And I have despised Les Habitants (a.k.a. the Canadiens) for almost as long. I just had to be at last night’s game . . . so yesterday morning I woke up and logged on to StubHub, my ticket broker of choice, and found a nice selection of tickets at a fairly reasonable price.

My wife and I had gone to the Bs opening night back in October—a ton of fun—but the sheer spectacle of a Game 7 was almost worth the price of admission itself: the house sure was rockin’, from start to finish, and seeing was B-lieving the outfits that some of the fans were wearing—they had more than their hearts on their sleeves, and many of them ended up being featured on the Jumbotron over center ice (maybe that was the point). I’ll not bother to tell the tale of the game—it’s happy history now. But I have to admit that when it went into overtime, I could feel one of my recurring nightmares coming on: how many times have I awakened in a cold sweat from the image of the goal scored by Jean Beliveau in double overtime in April of 1969 that eliminated the Bruins from the playoffs that year? Countless. What was it worth to feel utterly purged of that image after Nathan Horton scored the winner for the Bruins in overtime last night? Pricele$$!

BOSTON: VOICES AND VISIONS

Time flies . . . whether you’re having fun or not. And it sure has flown by as far as my blogging is concerned: I haven’t posted an entry in more than two months. I’ll not bother to proffer excuses; instead I’ll try to get back in blogging stride with the words below . . . which are actually, verbatim, a transcription of the brief remarks I had the pleasure—and the honor—of offering a week or so ago (on November 4th, to be exact) to lead off the celebration of the publication of the latest title in the catalogue of the University of Massachusetts Press, Boston: Voices and Visions, an anthology edited by my friend and colleague Shaun O’Connell. I am prompted to post these remarks in blog form partly to justify the posting of the pleasing snapshot of Shaun and yours truly (see below), taken by UMass Boston master photographer Harry Brett, that landed in my inbox this morning!

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For most of you gathered here today, Shaun O’Connell is the proverbial “man who needs no introduction.” Now in his 46th year as a member of the UMass Boston English Department, Shaun is the literal “last man standing” of the literal “founding fathers” of both the University and the Department. Picturing how the highlight reel of that exemplary career would play—the decades of teaching, of writing, of serving the Department and the University in myriad ways, of representing UMass Boston beyond these walls as a major public intellectual—we might all recall how Fyodor Dostoevsky, acknowledging the influence of short story master Nikolai Gogol, reportedly once said of an entire generation of Russian writers, “We have all come out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’.” (“The Overcoat” being one of Gogol’s signature short stories.) Shaun O’Connell’s “overcoat”—in Irish (I can’t resist), his cóta mór . . . his great coat—has been just as capacious. Colleague, mentor and friend to so many of us over almost five decades, those descriptors could well chime with William Butler Yeats’s praise reserved for Major Robert Gregory: “Soldier, scholar, horseman, he . . .”

But I come not to bury Shaun—not even in mounds of collegial admiration and personal affection—nor simply to praise him inadequately, but to give some sort of context for Boston: Voices and Visions.

Actually, Shaun himself gives that context in his first book, Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape, published 20 years ago this month. In that book Shaun established the essential coordinates for a coherent reading of—or mapping of—what he described as the “emblems and visions of place created by Greater Boston’s writers, writers who have invented and extended America’s sense of the city upon a hill.” Titling the seminal chapter “Hawthorne’s Boston and Other Imaginary Places,” Shaun set in motion his critical and scholarly analysis of a broad cross-section of writers—from our own Phillis Wheatley through William Dean Howells and Henry James to Edwin O’Connor and John Updike and beyond—who have indeed imagined into literary life not just “a city upon a hill” (or “the Athens of America” or “the Hub of the solar system”) but countless variations on the theme of Boston and environs as place and as possibility.

In one respect, Boston: Voices and Visions reads as Shaun O’Connell’s revisiting of that earlier inscription of Boston’s literary landscape by way of incisive introductions that frame the six thematic groupings of his generous selection of primary texts. The crucial difference, however, is that by way of Shaun’s carefully-chosen medley of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—extending from John Winthrop in 1630 to Patricia Powell (our former UMass Boston colleague) in 2004—this wide-ranging and far-reaching anthology adds high relief contours to that earlier mapping of Boston’s literary terrain. In a sense, it is the complement to, or perhaps even the completion of, that earlier project. Twenty years in the making? Shaun himself should be feeling high relief right about now!

But around six weeks ago, I was chatting with Shaun about the imminent publication of Boston: Voices and Visions. As blasphemous as it might sound, we ended up talking about the “pertinence” (or was it the “impertinence”?) of such a compilation in our age of Googlebooks and other electronic media that put entire libraries at our fingertips. Shaun wondered: “What is the place of such an anthology in this day and age?” Good question. And I hope that I proffered a good answer. “It’s a way of shaping the conversation,” I started. Then I became appropriately metaphorical: “It’s about defining the topography . . . of putting the full scope of ‘literary Boston’ literally on the map, not only for today’s readers but also for posterity.” I wish that I had had my wits—or my wit—sufficiently about me to borrow from John Winthrop and say, “The eyes of all people are upon you.” I was a bit more prosaic but no less certain: “It’s your legacy, Shaun.” And today, as we come together to help Shaun launch this landmark and landmarking book, we are the immediate beneficiaries . . .

HEY ROSETTA! . . . LIVE AT THE MIDDLE EAST DOWNSTAIRS

For the past couple of weeks there’s been an annoying ad on tv. I think it’s for some model of compact car . . . though it could actually be for car insurance. It features a young woman with a bland nasally voice and uninflected delivery who purports to be in a hipster band on some sort of tour. She’s wearing cut-off shorts (denim, I think) and fishnet (I think) stockings. A couple of mornings ago, my wife asked: “Who dresses like that in real life?” Well, we found out the answer that night—that would be this past Wednesday night—when we paid our first visit ever to The Middle East Downstairs, a longstanding Cambridge music venue that seems to feature mostly alternative rock bands. And the answer was: “Just about every young woman at The Middle East dresses like that.” We were amused. I guess we didn’t read the small print on The Middle East website about the dress code!

But even if we had dressed the part, it would have been tough for us to blend in to the predominantly twenty-something crowd gathered in the cavern-like performance space to see and hear the triple-bill of bands performing there that night. We had our twenty-something daughter with us—maybe she gave us some “street cred” . . . or maybe not: maybe she just confirmed how old we really are. But we weren’t really there to blend in—we were there to see the opening act, a band from St. John’s, Newfoundland called Hey Rosetta! Or actually we were there to see the violin player, Kinley Dowling, the daughter of our good old friends Alan and Estelle. Kinley is on tour with the core quartet of Hey Rosetta!, joining with a cello player to add some Electric Light Orchestra-like texture to their basic folk-rock sound. Hey Rosetta! played a well-received 45-minute set: we have their CD Into Your Lungs, so we were pleased to see them live and in person. And we were very happy to have some visiting time with the lovely Kinley, whom we hadn’t seen for quite a few years: she fit right in with those hip twenty-somethings . . . even though she wasn’t wearing cut-offs with fishnets. Our daughter remarked afterwards: “All the guys thought she was cool . . . and all the girls were jealous of her.” I couldn’t get my camera to work in the low-low light of Downstairs, but I’ve tracked down a video on YouTube from just after Kinley joined the band in Los Angeles in mid-August on their current connect-the-dots North American tour. Check it out!

Kinley mentioned that when the tour ends in Montreal she’ll hop on a plane to Vancouver to perform with another rising star from the vibrant eastern Canadian music scene, Jenn Grant . . . who happens to be the sister of another of our old good friends. Maybe they’ll end up at The Middle East some evening. We’d know how to dress the next time . . .

TEN YEARS AFTER . . . THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

A couple of weeks ago, driving by the Simmons Sports Centre in Charlottetown, PEI, I had a flashback to a rock concert that I sneaked into sometime in the early 1970s at that unlikely venue (a small hockey arena in a mostly residential neighborhood). The band was April Wine. They were formed in Halifax in the late 1960s and eventually found not only a national but even a south-of-the-border following. Their signature sound of twin lead guitars is still catchy a full 40 years later, and I have three of their tunes—“You Could Have Been a Lady,” “Bad Side of the Moon,” and “Roller”—on my iPod. As this old video shows, they were a tight band with a distinctive presence.

One flashback prompting another, I have to observe that today marks the 35th anniversary of a “road trip” that my friend Marty and I made from Charlottetown to Moncton, New Brunswick—we took my family’s old VW Beetle on the car ferry from Borden to Cape Tormentine—to see the British blues-rockers Ten Years After perform there at the Coliseum. Listening now (literally now) to TYA’s Recorded Live album, I am transported back to that transporting night when Alvin Lee lived up to (if not beyond) his “guitar hero” reputation. This video from 1975 would be pretty much what we saw and heard . . . but I remember the live show being in color!

THE BIG HOUSE + THE LANDMARK CAFE + PARADE DAY

In Ireland, the phrase “The Big House” is historically laden with baggage—political, social, economic, cultural—associated with the mansions (and sometimes castles) that dotted the countryside as homes to mostly Anglo-Protestant landholders whose identification and self-identification with Great Britain emblematized the conflicted relationship between colonizing Britain and colonized Ireland.

Believe me, then, when I say that we have our tongues firmly planted in our cheeks when we call our summer farmhouse rental on Prince Edward Island “The Big House.” By PEI standards it is a fairly substantial residence—especially for a farmhouse more than 150 years old: it includes 5 bedrooms , 2.5 baths, 2 parlors, a dining room and a spacious modern kitchen . . . all fully updated by its current owner (a descendant of the original owner . . . of Irish stock, I might add). Oh yes, there’s also a little room at the front of the house, in that little centre gable on the second floor—apparently this was known as “The Priest’s Room” because back in the day the priest coming out from Charlottetown on Saturday evening to say Sunday mass at St. Martin’s Church (about a mile up the road) would stay over in that room. The house is perfectly located for our vacation—a short walk across a road and down a lane to the south shore beach that I grew up on and that our daughters have known for their entire lives. We first rented the farmhouse in 2004 when another rental we had arranged fell through: we just spent our 7th family vacation under its roof . . . and expect to keep returning to it as our “summer home” well into the future.

A few years ago I took a photo from the back steps of the Big House that continues to please me. It shows the various barns and sheds still standing on the property: they’ve been repainted recently, but in this photograph they reflect the Island tradition of farmers painting the corner trim red on outbuildings so that they would be able find their way to them to tend to the livestock during winter blizzards. Or so my sister told me many years ago: she was working as a guide on a tour bus at the time, and such arcane knowledge was essential to her spiel. She also told how the cattle were complaining about the new technology at the time that allowed hay to be rolled into bales rather than cubed: apparently the cows claimed that they could no longer get “a square meal.”

As usual, this year’s version of our annual pilgrimage to PEI was filled with highlights involving family and friends—including various dinner gatherings at The Big House. Despite having only one week to squeeze in a whole year’s worth of visiting and general holidaying, we also managed to get “out and about.” One especially nice outing was a jaunt to the attractive village of Victoria-By-the-Sea for a meal at the Landscape Café. My wife and I had eaten there once before—around 20 years ago (it has been open for 21 years)—and our return visit with our daughters and my father was well worth waiting for: tasty food served up in the interesting atmosphere of a renovated general store.

One other “detail” of our visit worth mentioning is the Gold Cup and Saucer Parade, which for almost 50 years has added pomp and circumstance to the culminating harness race of the year at the Charlottetown Driving Park. The Gold Cup and Saucer Race also marks the end of Old Home Week . . . which in turn pretty much marks the end of summer on the Island. This year—for the first time since 2007—I marched in the parade as a member of the Charlottetown Community Clash Band . . . an intentionally ragtag gathering of local musicians (well, many of us are “former” music students) who have been showing up and creating a scene for the past 20 years or so. What we lack in rehearsal time we make up with enthusiasm and energy. Last year I watched the parade from the sidewalk and realized that I had more fun in previous years when I marched. So I found my old saxophone under a bed in my boyhood home, went to one of the two rehearsals, and then stepped out with a rush of adrenaline when the drumrolls started. Could there be a better way to observe the end of summer?

THE BLUES SCALE

Usually I don’t have to make New Year’s resolutions: my wife makes them for me. But this past January, I decided to challenge myself to shed a few pounds—20 pounds to be exact. Well, I did better than that, losing a total of 24.2 pounds in a little less than 5 months, which brought me back to my marriage weight just in time for our 25th wedding anniversary. That was in May. Since then I’ve backslid a bit: nine days in Dublin in June didn’t help; nor have all of the caloric temptations of the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. So last weekend I resolved to get back on the exercise wagon—well, back into the gym—with renewed commitment . . . which also required adding some new music to my iPod shuffle.

For much of my run for the roses during the winter and spring, I listened either to my 137-song “Rock Party” playlist or to my 50-song “Blues You Can Use” playlist. But at a couple of crucial points I tuned in exclusively to a couple of albums that I had been tempted by but had never gotten around to adding to my music library. The first was Piety Street by John Scofield. I wrote a lengthy blog post about Scofield and his band after I saw them perform at the Regattabar in Cambridge a year-and-a-half ago. Worrying that their recording would not come close to their terrific live act, I resisted the temptation of picking up the CD . . . but finally I succumbed—and I am happy to admit that my worrying was completely unwarranted. Ostensibly an album of gospel music, Piety Street is really a blues album of the first order, with Scofield’s guitar front and center—and it was just what I needed to keep me on the straight and narrow of the treadmill during the dark days of February.

But it wasn’t all that I needed: after years of having guitar hero Rick Derringer’s album Blues Deluxe in my shopping cart, I also finally added it to my listening mix. And what a great addition it proved to be: every single tune on the album—mostly blues standards—is a keeper . . . and the whole package certainly kept me go-go-going during March.

But now it’s August—the dog days, no less—and once again I am looking to the blues to tip the scale in my favor. So I currently have cued up on my iPod shuffle a pair of albums, by local blues bands, that I’ve been deferring the pleasure of listening to for a while . . . until now. One is Low Expectations by Ernie and the Automatics, a blues/rhythm-n-blues/rock unit that has been making some noise around here for the past couple of years. Part of their claim to fame is that a couple of the band members—guitarist Barry Goudreau and drummer Sib Hashian—are alums of the legendary “corporate rock” band Boston. Another part of their claim to fame is that the “Ernie” who lends the band half its moniker (he also plays rhythm guitar) is Ernie Boch, Jr., who sports a household name thanks to his late father, who owned several major car dealerships in the Boston area. Come on down! But the band is truly greater than the sum of its parts—which also include Brian Maes on keyboards and vocals, Mike “Tunes” Antunes on tenor sax, and Tim Archibald on bass. Low Expectations features tunes with super-tight arrangements, catchy hooks and fine guitar, piano, and sax work. I should get some pretty good mileage out of it. (I might also mention that Ernie and the Automatics are well worth catching live and in-person: I saw them at Firefly’s in Quincy back in January—they were barbeque hot!)

The other album that I added last weekend is Living in the Light by Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters, a band that I wrote about at length on this blog a year or so ago. This album came out not long after I saw them in concert in Arlington, and coincidentally, I was in the guitar repair shop in Winchester run by bass player Jim Mouradian and his son Jon on the morning that Jim received his copy of the CD—it was just sitting on the counter unopened and unlistened to: so it has been on my radar screen for quite a while. Well, it was worth waiting for . . . though the blues stylings are really quite different from those generated by Ernie and the Automatics. First of all, they are much more gospel-oriented, fueled considerably by Hammond B3 organ player Dave Limina and also by pianist Dave Maxwell on a couple of numbers. Also, some of the vocal numbers, delivered by Kim Wilson and Dave Keller, are a bit earnest (no pun intended on Boch, Jr.) lyrically: “What Can I Do For You” might be too overtly religious for some listeners’ tastes, “Child of a Survivor” has the Holocaust as its subject (an unlikely subject for a blues tune), and “Donna Lee” is a very personal tribute to Ronnie Earl’s wife. But, almost needless to say, the quality of the music—with Earl’s guitar the main event—is first-rate. With Jim Mouradian on bass and Lorne Entress on drums, Earl and Limina deliver the goods. No less than Ernie and the Automatics, Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters should help to keep me on track for my daily workout.

DUNKIN' DUGOUT . . .

So . . . last night my wife and I took our three daughters and a boyfriend of one of them to the Red Sox-Indians game at Fenway Park. It wasn’t the most dramatic game of the year . . . though we were already on our feet applauding the return of Mike Lowell to the lineup (he had been on the injured reserve list since late June) when he really lifted us up by hitting the first pitch he faced into the Monster seats, delivering what proved to be the winning run in a 3-1 Sox victory. Josh Beckett, who I checked out during his pre-game warmup in the bullpen, pitched very well—he allowed only three hits (one of them a solo home run) and was able to wriggle out of the several minor jams that he found himself in.

We enjoyed the game and the entire evening despite sitting in nosebleed seats—Row 48 (out of 50) in Section 41 of the bleachers: we were just two rows below the seats donated by Dunkin’ Donuts every game to kids in Boys and Girls Clubs and similar non-profit and charitable organizations. The Dunkin’ Dugout.

Fenway Park has its history, and it has its traditions—though some of them are relatively recent, like the en masse singing in the late innings of Neil Diamond’s hit “Sweet Caroline” and the Dropkick Murphys’ “Tessie” and even “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night. (The singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the seventh-inning stretch goes without saying.) But we also have a family tradition at Fenway that involves a visit, before the game, to a particular sausage stand on the street outside the ballpark. It is run by the family of a teacher our daughters had in high school: he works at the stand himself, and he and the girls always have happy reunions whenever we make it to a game. Not that we’re superstitious, but we have to believe that our faithful observance of that tradition contributes to the success that has become another Sox “tradition” in recent years!

DOG DUTY

I’m not quite sure how this happened, but somehow I have ended up on dog duty for our neighbors, keeping an eye on their two Chihuahuas for a day or so. Are these creatures even dogs? I’m not so sure. One of them looks like a chinchilla; the other is what is known as a teacup Chihuahua—the sort of critter that hides in Britney Spears’ handbag. My cat would eat them for breakfast . . . if she could ever catch up with them: they sure are hyper, and they sure do move fast!

I think their names are Zoey and Bella, but I’m not sure which is which, so—taking a page out of Vicki Hearne’s book Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name, in which she emphasizes the importance of giving a pet a distinctive individual name—I call them Scruffy and Baldy.

PRETTY WOMAN

All cats are beautiful, and they know it . . . including my cat, Honey, who recently posed herself (obviously for comparative purposes) next to a cover photo of Julia “Pretty Woman” Roberts.

O'DOCHERTY SLEEPS . . .

This morning’s Boston Globe included the sad news of the death, last month, of Boston-based Irish-born painter and musician David O’Docherty. Reading his obituary, I was transported first of all back to my earliest days in Boston, in 1984—specifically to my first visit to The Black Rose, a landmark Irish pub near Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market. One of the distinctive features of the pub at that time was a large painting (probably 4’ x 7’) of faces and profiles all blended together into a sort of Chagall-esque expressionistic dreamscape. The painting, by O’Docherty, was titled Finnegan’s Sleep , an obvious allusion to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—that “lingerous longerous book of the dark”—and featured many recognizable figures with literary associations in particular: Joyce, his character Leopold Bloom from Ulysses, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Casey, Seamus Heaney. . . . Needless to say, I found the painting both eye-catching and intriguing . . . and I was prompted to arrange for O’Docherty to have a show of his paintings at the Harbor Gallery at UMass Boston. A quarter-century later, most of the details of that event have faded from my memory, but I do know that the show included Finnegan’s Sleep. I bought a poster of that piece and it has hung in my office ever since. . . .

But I was also transported back to some point in the past decade when I happened to be in the vicinity of Downtown Crossing and my ear was drawn to the sound of an Irish jig being played on a tin whistle. I had not seen David O’Docherty since the mid-1980s, but I immediately recognized him as the man behind the music. I am quite sure that he was not busking —he was just playing his whistle for the joy of playing and for the joy that his playing gave to others. After a few minutes we made eye contact and then we had a nice chat: he was a gentle and generous spirit. Reading his obituary this morning, I remember with happiness that chance meeting by way of his musical talent so many years after we first crossed paths by way of his talent as a painter.

DISRAELI GEARS

I’m sitting in Cakes right now, a coffee and baked goods shop located a block or so from my house. My trusty steed is tethered to a signpost outside the window—the same signpost I tied it to a week or so ago when the chain slipped off its teeth and got jammed in the rear sprockets. I was on my way to the gym and didn’t feel like taking time to fix the bike’s problem, so I simply dismounted, locked it up, and walked the rest of the way. When I got to the gym I texted my wife to let her know what happened: I worried that she might drive by the coffee shop and notice my bike there and think that I was “cheating”—stopping in for a cupcake instead of burning off last night’s cupcakes (metaphorical) on the treadmill.

A couple of days ago, the Tour de France bicycle race was scandalized by a similar situation. No, not a rider being falsely accused of stopping for a cupcake (ou peut-être une crêpe?) . . . but the leader, the guy in the yellow jersey, having his chain slip off its sprocket, which allowed another rider to pass him and ultimately win that stage of the race and thus get to wear the yellow jersey the next day. Apparently this was a violation of bike-racing etiquette. Sacre bleu! That’s a very nuanced notion of fair play . . .

Anyway . . . all of this reminds me of that fine album released by the supergroup/power trio known as Cream—Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker—back in 1967. Just for the sake of Clapton’s utterly sculpted guitar solo on “Sunshine of Your Love,” Disraeli Gears could be a desert island essential. Cream trivialogists will know that the album’s title derives not from the name of 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli but from a roadie’s mispronunciation of the word “derailleur” when he chipped in to Clapton’s chatting about buying a racing bicycle with that so-named gear mechanism. Those same trivialogists will also know that “Badge,” another song recorded by Cream (on the album Goodbye), derives its title from Clapton’s misreading of the word “bridge” (as inscribed by song co-writer, Beatle George Harrison) on a sheet of paper with lyrics and chords. How random. Speaking of random . . . I wonder what the odds are that either of those songs would pop up on my iPod Shuffle when I’m on the treadmill at the gym thinking about eating cupcakes and watching Tour de France highlights on ESPN?

ON THE ROAD AGAIN . . .

I’m not sure how or when a trip to Annapolis, MD got on my calendar . . . but I can now add that quaint state capital to my list of been-there-done-that places. The temperature was pushing a withering 100 degrees during my evening/morning visit, but I still managed to walk the heart-of-downtown streets three times and mostly liked what I saw . . . including the Starbucks in the cellar of the Maryland Inn. It was a cool haven . . . with a cool vibe as it was once a happening jazz club called the King of France Tavern. The wall-hangings include photos and clippings of jazz greats who played there—Teddy Wilson, Chet Baker, Charlie Byrd . . . and my old friend Gene Bertoncini. In fact, a clipping from 1979 previewing Gene’s performance there with bassist Michael Moore prompted me to cue up their album Two in Time on my iPod as I sat there: time travel!

I wish that I could have been transported so easily on my drive down to Annapolis. Whenever I’m on a road trip—no matter where I am—I keep my eye out for Prince Edward Island license plates: it drives my wife crazy, but I always assume that I would know anyone from that small common ground. Well, this time I ended up getting a long close-up look at a PEI license plate while sitting behind a tractor-trailer for a full hour in virtually standstill traffic in the vicinity of Lyme, CT. I didn’t get a look at the driver, though: when the jam finally broke, I was off to the races . . .

My lucky wife had flown down to Annapolis on Monday, so she was spared that traffic. But the trip back to Boston was even worse—we lost easily two hours sitting in a bumper-to-bumper gridlock trying to get onto the George Washington Bridge in NYC. According to the car thermometer, the outside temperature was 108 degrees—so hot that the GPS device in the front window shut down . . . not that we needed it at the rate we were moving!

But the trip back from Annapolis did have an upside—an overnight in Philadelphia . . . a city I had never visited before, but would happily return to again. Mostly we just wandered the streets—no agenda beyond getting a feel for the place. We had a hotel room right in the center of the city—on the 27th floor looking out on City Hall. But the real highlight was our evening of random wandering that included first a fine pint at a fine pub called The Black Sheep and, much later, a terrific meal at Lolita, a Mexican restaurant on 13th Street. Like a number of restaurants we checked out, Lolita has a BYOB license—which we were not prepared for. So imagine our delight when our server said that she would see if anyone had left anything behind that we might enjoy . . . and sure enough, she showed up at our table with a fairly substantial quantity of Jose Cuervo tequila. The food itself was outstanding—but with tequila thrown into the mix (as it were), we ended the night truly in Margaritaville!

The next morning, before hitting the road back to Boston, we wandered around Philly both on foot and by car . . . for a couple of very hot but very pleasant hours. I found the heart of the city stunningly attractive—almost Parisian in the grand scale of its buildings (and of the architectural styles). I kept on thinking “Philadelphia, Here I Come!”—I hope to get back there sooner rather than later . . .

IN FULL SWING . . . JEAN McKENNA O'DONNELL

This morning’s tide of emails brought home all the usual flotsam and jetsam—notices of new releases on Amazon.com and on iTunes, various barely resistible offers for health products, the daily overtures from Nigerian scam artists addressing me as “Beloved one,” a reminder from my University bookstore that I had not yet placed by book order for the Fall semester. . . . But one message floated to the top of all those—news of an event that I’m going to try to squeeze onto the calendar for July 18th: a concert at Greenvale Vineyards in Portsmouth, RI featuring jazz vocalist Jean McKenna O’Donnell. The concert is scheduled for 1:00-4:00 p.m. and admission is free. The event also features wine tastings.

I first met Jean about 7 years ago and at the time she was a long-retired jazz chanteuse. Prodded by her proud husband, she confessed that “in her day” she could hold her own with a big band swinging behind her. I think that in the course of our chat it emerged that she has fine musical bloodlines—her brother is the legendary jazz pianist Dave McKenna (now departed). So fast-forward about 5 years to the first time I actually heard Jean sing . . . at a concert in Woonsocket, RI memorializing her late brother. That was in December of 2008. The concert itself was warm and poignant as it featured a number of New England jazz musicians who played with Dave McKenna during his lengthy career. But the concert also served notice that Jean was back on the scene! She had just released a CD—appropriately titled Full Circle, as indeed she had come full circle, returning to the bandstand quite a long while after first making a name for herself. It was great to see her performing in the tribute to her brother . . .

And so this morning when I got that email, I immediately spun the dial on my iPod and summoned up Full Circle for a good listen. Comprising mostly tunes from the Great American Songbook—“You Stepped Out of a Dream,” “Taking a Chance on Love,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “I’ve Got a Crush on You”—it’s an altogether pleasing compilation. Supported by Mike Renzi on piano, Dick Johnson on alto sax and clarinet, Marshall Wood on bass, and Jon Wheatley on guitar, Jean is in fine company and in fine vocal form. The CD is a real treat!

No doubt Jean will be singing some of those gems on July 18th at Greenvale Vineyards, which is located on the Sakonnet River just five miles north of downtown Newport, RI. For more details, contact Greenvale Vineyards (582 Wapping Rd., Portsmouth, RI) at (401) 847-3777.

THE MONIKERS . . . MAKING A NAME FOR THEMSELVES

So last night I was out on a hot date . . . with my middle daughter. On her recommendation, we took in an evening of music at All Asia in Central Square in Cambridge that included—for us, featured—a rockin’ four-person band called The Monikers. A great name for a band! I had seen this foursome before—many times before . . . mostly sitting in our kitchen or in our family room, sometimes strumming guitars and singing Beatles tunes (one night the entirety of Abbey Road, word for word, chord for chord, note for note . . . until 2:00 in the morning). But I had never heard them perform under their official moniker . . .

Well now I have, and they are well worth catching “live and in person.” Not only do these self-styled “hipsters” look the part with their skinny-legged jeans and their moppish haircuts—they live up to their appearance with their playing and singing. And with their songwriting. And with their onstage performing. Hey, they’re not just making a name for themselves—they make a spectacle of themselves . . . led by Francis Anderson on guitar, keyboard, and lead vocal: he really creates a scene all by himself! And he’s backed up with real finesse by Peter Chinman on lead guitar and supporting vocal, by Tim Marchetta-Wood on room-thumpin’ bass, and by Erica Warner holding them all together with impressive work on the drum kit. They threw a few covers into their set—most notably a show-stopping arrangement of the Beatles’ iconic “Let It Be”—but mainly played catchy original tunes with titles like “Dressed Up in Yellow,” “That’s What She Said,” and “Catch a Little Rainbow.” (A nice touch: the band provided takeaway lyric sheets.)

I hear that The Monikers have a few more gigs lined up for the summer. Check out their website. And catch them if you can!