We kind of thought the Spontaneous Duets event would be crowded so we said we would make a point to get there early. We didn’t and it wasn’t. The event was on our calendar so it showed up on my watch but the 4pm start time really caught us by surprise. The sound in the unlikely Eastman rehearsal space on the corner of East And Gibbs is really nice. Surrounded by glass, there is no need for sound re-enforcement and the grand piano sounds magnificent in here.
This year’s round robin started with a woman playing alto sax by herself. A six string electric bassist joined her after five minutes and five minutes later the sax player sat down when a vibraphonist joined the bassist. A piano player joined the vibraphonist and then a trumpet player took the vibraphonists’ spot.
The room got downright raucous when a tenor sax player reached for the sky with the trumpeter. A bass player, who we had just heard playing with Rich Thompson’s quartet, joined the sax player and the music settled down into pure beauty’s with long sustained notes. Then drums with bowed bass followed by trombone and drums. Finally a guitar with the trombone and then the guitarist solo. This is a really cool concept, part of International Jazz Day. Today.
We stopped over at the Little for the Prince event. Spevak was there to cover it and a WDKX dj was supposed to be spinning Prince tunes in the café but they didn’t show up. A women in line with Peggi said “I was just listening to the station in my car and they’re playing all Prince.” So Marian climbed up on the counter and pulled the rabbit ears out of the radio. We told Jeff we liked his recap of the local Music Hall of Fame event. He spilled quite a bit of ink on the Plasmatics and I told him Wendy was in my high school class. She lived over the right field line of the baseball field at the end of my street. Doug Klick was a lefty and he used to pull the ball into her yard where she was sunbathing. And then, of course we’d run in there to retrieve it.
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