jersey jive

home again, taking a few days to shake off the f-x of my recent sojourn in new joisey, which included coming to terms with a few unpleasant realizations and an extra super double helping of stress. at least i was able to gain some empathy for what my big sis goes through on a daily/weekly basis. and nicotine remains generally available in the northeast, although the price differential with heroin is shrinking, and you can't smoke indoors anywhere. also, i got to see things i miss like neighborhood bars 'n' grocery stores with apartments upstairs, and _diners_. also noted how much undeveloped real estate there is in sopranoland, which, as my friend geoff from philly sez, "considering it's the most densely populated state, is a good indication that we're still far from soylent green."

had to pass up oppos to hear the fort worth symphony at carnegie hall and blue oyster cult at irving plaza, and by the time i had the uncommitted hours to visit the princeton record exchange, i decided to roll up in a fetal position and rock instead. spent a lot of time at my mom's house, where there's no music playback equipment, to streaming toons from kosmik radiation radio, the watt from pedro show, and johncoltrane.com (the latter of which seems to be unavailable for the moment). in the car, a burned cd-r from stumptone gtrist frank cervantez that included toons by led zep (an ace live "since i've been loving you"), ethiopian jazz cat mulatu astatqe (whose music i didn't realize i'd heard before in the bill murray flick broken flowers), u2 producer dude daniel lanois, brit post-rockers talk talk (who apparently made lotsa nice music after "it's my life"), john fahey, papa m (see clip below), space needle, and sun kil moon _saved my life_, so now i've got more music to find out about.



made it out one night to a spot called novita's (formerly the cornerstone) in metuchen (same town where hembree played with the underground railroad a coupla yrs back, it turns out) to hear some jazz last friday. a good crowd, considering it was opening night (there was still a big dumpster full o' detritus on the sidewalk outside, and the screensavers on the pos terminals still had the joint's old name/logo), and decent-if-pricey italian chow, along with some musos my brother-in-law's been going to hear for yrs. gtrist was a pittsburgh native named ron affif who had some nice bebop chops but couldn't seem to regulate his volume to the point where the rest of the band (including a japanese lady pianist named tomoko ohno who had a nice herbie-mccoy thing going on, when you could hear her) was audible from the p.a.-less stage. plus he looked kinda like one of my other brothers-in-law would if he played gtr and did the carlos santana squint 'n' grimace routine. (sorry, michael.) per art blakey's dictum, the best muso on the stand was the drummer, cat named nick scheuble, whose gig it might actually have been -- he made the announcements and seemed to drive the proceedings, had a good sense of the dynamics of the room, and even switched to brushes to solo. couldn't get them to play "ruby, my dear," though. someday. somewhere.