Sunday, September 17, 2006

cats and dogs

because i suck, i completely missed the entahr jazz by the boulevard festival this yr. dave williams pinged jeremy hull on friday and asked him to tell me that they were doing a reprise of the thelonious monk trib we dug so much at arts fifth avenue a few months back: two sets, starting at 6:30pm. guh. i'd had a hella wk at work and by the time i got home, it wasn't really on the cards. instead, we went to fred's for green dragon pork and convo w/jesse sierra hernandez, then home to collapse in an exhausted heap.

sat'day, i spent some time hangin' out at sessions music and had fun jammin' with some of john zaskoda and lucas white's students before running over toons with z-man, john shook and brandon wallace for a gig with their blues trio, which has the same name as my college band (dirty pool), at the mule pub that night. after that i headed back to the house for some downtime w/my sweetie before we fell by the black dog (whose owner didn't even realize his employees billy and shaggy maintain websites for him; he thought it was all _word-of-mouth_ that was brangin' all those ppl out, hahaha) for tony diaz's wedding reception. saw matt hembree, about to depart on a week-long tour with the underground railroad; godspeed, pal. hung out with ray liberio and jesse (who'd played the jazzfest with sleeplab that afternoon) again. chowed some good 'que from red hot & blue and had a shot called a "royal ho'," courtesy of jimmy rodriguez, the fort's finest bartender, then we had to cut out before the music started to get over the the mule.

i hadn't been in the mule since it was the pig 'n' whistle about 12 yrs ago, and vaguely remember a friend tending bar in what i _think_ was that location ca. '79. the crowd was heavy on tcu ppl and i was glad tcu won their game against texas tech; otherwise, it coulda gotten _ugly_. i sat out the first set. zasko, shook, and brandon have a nice band dynamic together. z-man's a powerful singer and impressive gtrist with an interesting style: he has a real percussive right hand, but doesn't use a pick. he knows his gear, too, and is ace at getting a great tone out of whatever he happens to be using at the time (in this case, an epi les paul and 50w marshall combo). a complete gentleman, he brought along a fender deville for me to play thru along with my indo squier (which he'd done a set-up on that afternoon) 'n' pedals, so all i had to do was plug everything in and play. we managed to run evabody off during the second set, but then ron geida and jeffrey williams showed up and ron 'n' i jammed some of the stuff we used to play as "the occasionals." shook keeps threatening to learn "in memory of elizabeth reed," so maybe that'll happen next time. the bartender told me we'd definitely get booked back, even if we ran evabody off, so i guess i'll be back there if zasko wants me to be.

today we slept in late, then walked around in the rain distributing newsletters for our neighborhood association. i procrastinated as long as i possibly could before finally writing an article for work that i thought was due thursday but i found out late in the week is due tom'w. mission accomplished.

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