Serendipitously 5:16 AM

     My sleep rhythm is all over the place these days and I find myself at the keyboard at 4:10 in the morning, listening to Charlie Hunter playing solo about two years ago in Oakland. Hunter is a guitar player who mostly plays a seven-string guitar/bass hybrid. It is amazing to watch him play, running bass lines, lead arpeggios and rhythm backing simultaneously.

     He's played as a leader, sideman and accompanist. Some of this band work was with Garage a Trois with Skerik, a sax player that has to be heard -- and seen -- to fully appreciate. This clip is of them taking on Jimi Hendrick's If 6 Was 9 which I think Jimi would have approved of.

     I don't listen to a lot of music these days, except in the wee hours when I stumble across something I like and then wander along the serendipitous trails following where the muse leads me. Yeah, muse. I'm not much of a musician, but I do feel the pull of a muse that guides me to music to listen to. And, once I am a ways down that trail, I often forget where the point of entry was. Like, how I found Charlie Hunter. I was re-reading an email that mentioned Charlie Mingus and his introduction to Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the late multi-instrumentalist jazz player. But, how I got from Kirk to . . . oh, yeah, Charlie Hunter used to play with a group called T.J. Kirk that fused elements of the music of Thelonious Monk, James Brown and Kirk. They originally called the group James T. Kirk, honoring not only the musicians who inspired them but the iconic Star Trek commander. When they signed with Warmer Brothers, the name became an issue, since Kirk's name was copyright to another entity, so they shuffled it around to T.J. Kirk. This clip is from 1995 at the SF Wine Festival on the Embarcadero.

T.J. Kirk, San Francisco, 1995

     So, this is the way I whiled away some time at o'dark-thirty on a Sunday morning. When I was younger and in another city, I was often up at this hour, listening to music either live, in the clubs and coffee houses in NYC's Greenwich Village, on the radio or on my hi-fi system -- an odd combination of devices that spun a vinyl disc under a sharp object and took the tiny electrical current thus produced and sent it to a couple of tube preamplifiers and amplifiers. Tubes are those things that light up in an amp that aren't LEDs. So, yeah, I'm an old guy, sue me.

     Music happened all the time back in those days. I imagine in some circles it still does, but I fell out of that orbit some time ago and haven't found my way back to it, except at odd hours sitting at my laptop keyboard, with my Sony earbuds in place.

     So, to return to this odd odyssey, one of the places I was sent to hear Charlie Hunter's music was NPR. Now, I don't listen to NPR all that often, since I don't share the political views expressed there. But they have some damn good music, so I end up there fairly often for sounds. While there this morning, I noticed a listing for someone named Rachael Yamagata. How could I not investigate a female vocalist with a name like that? I'm a sucker for female vocalists, fascinated by exotic-looking women and attracted, if only in a rather vague, platonic way, to dark women with blue eyes. Ms. Yamagata hits on all points. So I listened to an hour of her from the World Cafe in Philadelphia. I like her. I don't buy CDs any more, but I will ad her to my play list on Pandora, for sure. You can listen to her at http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=140821897&m=140954599 I also found some videos of her on YouTube like this one.

     So, at something like 5:13 -- real close to the magic hour of 5:16 AM from the poem of the same name by my friend Shepard Sherbell from back in the day when many of us only saw sunrise from the back side -- I'm going to try and see if I can find some sleep.