This is Properly Tribal

For the second year in a row now on my wife’s birthday, we’ve headed off to Beijing’s wonderful new place of worship: The Blue Note.   It’s been open for three years now or so and it is a wonderful addition to the city.  Stuck down in Qianmen, in a lovely but inconvenient part of the city, it is worth the extra effort, even on a cold November night. 

We are particularly fortunate in that we discovered a few trips back that the house manager was from the same county in Shandong as my wife.  This would, of course, mean absolutely nothing were I to have met someone who grew up in the same town as I in the Blue Note in Manhattan.  “That’s nice.  You don’t say?”  Would have been the extent of the exchange.  In China and certainly in Shandong, this is properly tribal.  He is very gracious about hosting us, every time we come.  We return to the club, in part, because of him.

Last year the prolific Ron Carter was in Beijing with four female cellists in-tow.   Lao Xiang got my wife an autographed bottle of wine by the great bass-man.  It was a lovely gesture and she was thrilled.  This year Carmen Souza was in town.  I admit I wasn’t familiar with her work and when I first took a quick look on Youtube, I reckoned she was from Brazil.  But she or at least her parents hailed from another corner of the former Portuguese empire:  Cape Verde.  

Simple trio of bass, drums and her on guitar and/or piano she was outstanding and managed to work the staid Beijing crowd into some spirited call and response.  I was happy to hear her perform work by that other great descendent of Cape Verdian lineage:  Horace Silver.  They dove into versions of “Song for My Father” and “Cape Verdian Blues" and I fixed on her commanding musicianship locked in a groove with her rhythm section.  

I didn’t stop my daughter when she ordered a desert plate for the table but I would have if I’d known that our man from Wudi Xian was going to comp our table with a birthday cake shortly thereafter.  Wonderfully unexpected.  Lovely way to spend a loved one’s birthday.  See you next year. 

Saturday , 11/18/17