Damn what a week!!
The weekend at Bonnaroo was a blast, and thoroughly exhausting. I plan to lay it all out for you shortly. But the week that followed was just as exciting. Let’s see how quickly I can summarize the whole experience for you.
Tuesday night was drinks with the coworkers, brought about in a roundabout kind of way. Plans were made a week or so before I left on my trip this past weekend to celebrate the birthday of Lauren (fellow employee of Heartbeat Digital) with mass quantities of drinking on a party bus to Atlantic City. However, due to a lack of people she wasn’t able to secure the bus and so the plans changed.
The new venue was to be Lea , a somewhat hidden bar in one the tunnels through some part of Grand Central station. So hidden in fact that Chris, Andy and I walked past the entrance at least twice — their “sign” as a little 1′ by 2′ name etched on the lower corner of a row of windows. Trust me — this place hid very well in plain sight.
The interior was tres swanky, with high ceilings, a large rack of bottles filled with all sorts of colored liquors and lava red walls (why is it we always seem to pick bars with red walls?). The food matched the interior in taste, with great sushi, chicken satay, wasabbi peas and quality drinks from the bar.
When it came time to settle our tab I had a feeling we had done a nice job of running it up. Swanky place, at least 10 people on the same tab…but we exceeded even my wildest guess at cost: $500 and change (gratuity included). Everyone had to dig real deep to cover that bill. There were also murmurs from some of those involved that the supposedly “free” drinks the ladies were supposed to be enjoying may not have been after all, but unfortunately no one brought that up at the time. Why? Hmm…can’t seem to remember that one. All in all, it was still probably a cheaper night than the trip to A.C. would have been for me.
Wednesday night was my first opportunity to see jazz guitar virtuoso John Scofield and his trio featuring Steve Swallow on bass and Bill Stewart on drums. The venue of honor was the Kaufman Center, an intimate yet acoustically perfect theater that I had 3rd row seats in.
Quite the intense experience, I must say. The three were tight in playing together, and this was by far one of the purest jazz experiences I’ve had. They played mostly tracks from their album EnRoute. A copy of the night’s set list, courtesy of Mr. Fred Reissig (via the Scofield mailing list):
- It is written
- The Things I Love (Cole Porter)
- Hammock Soliloquy
- Name That Tune (aka Perdido – Spanish for lost – Sco said his playing was lost on that one! Did not sound like it!) (Swallow)
- Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans
- C major, Seven sharp, Five
- Alfie
- Over Big Top
- (Encore) Wee
All in all a great performance in whole, but the stand out memory for me was Johns solo in “Over Big Topâ€. AWESOME! JAW DROPPING! It brought to my mind his mind-boggling solos from the Ãœberjam gigs and nudged me to grab a copy of the album as soon as I got home.
Finally, Friday night. Lauren’s birthday, part two. This is a first for me actually celebrating a birthday twice, but any excuse to explore the city’s nightlife is a good one for me. Of course I’d be keeping a closer watch on my drinking budget on this trip.
The venue of choice was Noca, a nice little bar on the west side of Spring St. I got to know it quite well, in fact. See, somewhere in between reading the email invite to actually showing up at the bar I missed the part where it said that everything started at 10pm. Instead, I walked over there as soon as I left work and was sitting down with a beer at 6:30, waiting for everyone else to show up.
But still even that turned out to be an okay thing. For one, I got happy hour pricing. For another, I got to have a nice long and intriguing conversation with the bartender (Julia, I believe) and some of the other customers as they came and went. By the time everyone else showed up I was just hitting my prime, and the next few hours became a raucous blur that only my camera can say for certain really happened.
So that brings us to now, and my fevered attempt to get this all down before the alcohol sops up my short term memories. A week for the record books to be sure.
Tags: Personal