"a musical wasteland of endless bass solos and fart-like runs ... "
This was all I could muster after seeing Wycliffe.
I don't know if the music was lacking, it was the overall vibe of the Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors crowd (most of them there to see Randy Newman this night) ... younger now, but no less pretentious and trying-too-hard-seeming as when I used to live across the street and (barely) attended auld FU.
Or, have I finally stopped trying too hard to dig jazz?
When I used to immerse in the scene, in the clubs, eating cheeseburgers ... waitresses (swimming in sax!) ... with the crowing, old voices of jazz legends nightly, and Wryly Sardonix demanding I leave ... which I did one night, mid-set, when he yelled from the stage that he sounded "like shit" and the cause of that mess fell on my deaf ears ... WHAT!?
I stormed offstage that night before he did! There's only one King, bitch, and I left the building!!!
... Where was I?
Oh, right. So Wycliffe Gordon ...
I went to see James Brown once, back in the day when we lived in America ... and shuffling around the stage at Radio City Music Hall at one point with an RK-100, he launched into a noodling rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" ...
Now don't ever let anyone try and tell you that James Brown, 'the Godfather', was NOT a show-stopper! He stopped that show dead ... ground to a halt, as he strutted and poked on his shoulder-slung Korg, an eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth verse. Of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame".
Really.
"The hell is he doing?" a guy behind me asked his date. Something large and thrown fell just short of the stage ... A chorus of "boos" began, like an imagined cliché scene, and rose in cresecendo until filling the theater.
James Brown stripped to his undershorts and started kicking Rockette-like, as the curtain came down and there wasn't an encore.
Just kidding! Nobody really threw anything.
But I remember that night well ... I hooked up with a girl who thought she had tickets to see Jethro Tull ... and experienced something like it last night seeing Wycliffe.
Or maybe I wasn't in the mood.
