Hayes Valley Satanic Tambourine Jazz Trio Delight-Cafe Mercury, SF CA; 6/21/19

Quite a funny name, right? Especially since Ben, the only person in this group that isn't a huge Metal fan, coined it. The music is about as far from Metal as one could get, too. Straight ahead Jazz, in fact.
It was interesting walking around Hayes Valley before we played. That place is SO different from the way that I remember it. I only ever drive through these days, and not that often. To get a ground level view of what's going on in the neighborhood.....wow.
Did I mention Jazz? Hayes Valley Satanic Tambourine Jazz Trio Delight did indeed work with it, playing some tunes by Charlie Parker, Bobby Timmons, and Lee Morgan. We also played originals by pianist Ben Paul. It was really cool to share the sounds with Eli Pontecorvo on bass. We do a LOT of improvising together. Fun to try to pry those vibes into a more traditional matrix. I still feel like Jazz is a valid form, especially when Standards are being done, and it was really nice to have a go at a few of them. Kind of made me think about my attempts, many years ago, to do so. Those attempts were not that fruitful; it's really neat to have a try at them all of these years later. Thoughts of Herbie Lewis, Richie Goldberg, and a few of the people that I met at New College.
It seemed as though we played pretty well on a technical level too, not too loud, but definitely keeping things swinging. What a nice evening.

Below: my sweet little Jazz kit; Eli and Ben listen to a woman describing her Wobbly mother