Rushing Rolls and Sudden Drops

Lawrence Clark was in town.  For the third year in a row, we’ve made a habit of heading down to Beijing’s wonderful, very own Blue Note.  (That’s right Shanghai, you still ain’t got one.)  The general manager, who is from my wife’s home town is still there.  He arranged a nice night for us once again.  It’s a schlepp to head down to the Legation Quarter, and none of the restaurants I used to know down there seem to still be around, but the Blue Note carries on.  

My wife would have preferred, I know, to have seen a jazz vocalist, preferably a woman.  Two years ago we caught Dee Dee Bridgewater, who’s outstanding.  Last year we saw Carmen Souza from Cape Verde.  But this year, the night of her day, would be an evening of hard bop and nothing happening the weekend before or after seemed to make any sense.  So around 6:00PM we headed down to see Mssr. Clark for the 7:30PM set. 

I was not familiar with his work.  In this day and age though, one needn’t wonder much about precisely what a new act will sound like.  Spotify and Youtube have plenty of his work up and available for consumption.  Listening I wasn’t sure about anyone else in the family, but I knew I would love it.  Big, full tenor sound, shedding, shedding, shedding. 

As always happens, we arrived late.  And we got ushered to our seats during the first song.  And as we settled in I was immediately struck by the drummer, the one: Diego Ramirez.  Perhaps because Lawrence Clark had done his guild work with Coltrane’s drummer, the late Rashied Ali, we had a particularly outstanding drummer as part of Mr. Clark’s band this evening.  Ramierz had me mesmerised and sitting where we did we had a straight shot, uninterrupted line of site to his rushing rolls and sudden drops.

Later, after the show I got to talk to both Clark, who was glad someone knew who Rashied Ali was, as well as Mr. Ramirez.  The latter also lived back home in New York but he caught me off guard when he said he’d grown up in Cork in the West of Ireland.  I didn’t really perceive much of a brogue in his diction, and he mentioned that his dad hailed from Guate-Guatemala.  But if someone's gonna claim Cork, it’s probably best that you just get out of their way and let them do so. 

On the way out we bumped in to a few of my daughter’s teachers from a few years back.  One was from Scotland hand he was suitably gob smacked to hear of the drummer’s home town.  I was asleep in that cab, not long after we made our way out from Ch’ien 23, back out to the burbs. 

Thursday, 11/15/18