miscellany

a couple of random things to knock out. highlight of my (jazz related) week, i got yelled at by marc ribot yesterday afternoon at the kinkos on east houston. i was running in to knock out a couple of quick copies and the only free, working copy machine had all this really beat up, ruffled sheet music everywhere and a open guitar case leaning against it. i went to sneak in quickly, from across the room, ‘hey don’t touch that!’. ‘excuse me?’ ‘it’s broken, but i’m still working there!’ ‘okay.’ that’s weird, i think that’s marc ribot. he was clearly agitated and rushed, got someone to fix the copy machine, duplicated a couple more parts and grabbed all his stuff in a bundle in his arms as he started to run out. ‘excuse me. umm, pardon me. are you marc ribot?’ ‘yes.’ ‘oh. I’m a big fan.’ he smiled, lightened up, and ‘thanks man’. ‘kinkos is the worst, huh?’ ‘yeah,’ and he ran out. it was pretty awesome.

went to the jazz standard the other night with my girl and a couple of friends. the show was the elio villafranca trio- strong but not spectacular modal cuban expanded things. but, ate the blue smoke barbecue for the first time. it was really, really good, and no less of an authority than my lady (she’s from dallas), identified it the best barbecue in new york. can’t recommend it enough. however, i made a huge ordering faux pas by getting the texas beef ribs, which were a little dry and flavorless. spent the rest of the evening begging for pork from my girl’s combo plate.

andrew hill passed the other day. definitely a major hitter and, from all accounts, his recent albums on blue note are great. i don’t feel qualified to write about andrew hill- never really got him, don’t own a ton of the classic albums (think i only have point of departure and judgement), and haven’t heard the new ones. so i’ll leave it to richard davis to eulogize (thanks brian for passing this to me).

there was a great response to the hancock youtube clips that i figure should be block quoted and posted. eric, i’m not sure who you are, but this was pretty cool.

‘Funny thing about that... I used to work at E-mu systems and they made and still make some of the finest digital sound manipulation equipment around (even if CreativeLabs swallowed them up)... anyways I sat around the corner from some of the hardware developers and they would talk about how in the 80's Herbie would come up to Santa Cruz and just pop into the factory, snag the latest prototype right from the testing stations and then it was all Future Shock... He was really at the cutting edge of that stuff... George Duke too he was another player on E-mu team.’

also, we’re setting up another jazz party at Lolita on the 23rd. rearrange you’re calendars.