Luminaries Jamming After Hours

Monday, Monday.  Not sure why but I asked my younger daughter, when it was my turn to suggest tunes, and we were done with the Mamamoo song she’d been playing, to throw on “Sound Affects”, the 1980 Jam album.  I’d had her throw on “All Mod Cons” our last ride and chronologically speaking we should have moved on to “Setting Sons,” yes another word play, but we’ll save it for another day.  Instead, we sailed over the Mid-Hudson Bridge listening to the bass line of “Pretty Green” give way to the charm of “Monday.”  And though I’d heard that song one-hundred or more times before, I thought for the first time about how odd it was that he was “dreaming of Monday,” unlike all the other songs, that rue the day, like “I Don’t Like Monday’s” or perhaps the original, “Stormy Monday.”

My little one headed off to class and I told her to take it slow this week.  She has a lot building up culminating in an SAT test and the dreaded “second” vaccine shot this weekend.  She walked off with the Jam playing on her phone and I turned to the Clay Pigeon on Woof-Moo.  He and another DJ were discussing the photographer W. Eugene Smith and his loft in the Flower District during the 1950s where he photographed and recorded countless jazz luminaries jamming after hours.  Looking online now, one can see that there is a web site for the Jazz Loft Project which has photos and some music from the remarkable four-thousand hours of recorded material.

 

I swung by the Chase bank, where I paid three dollars for the privilege of using their ATM.  I must say, I’ve never liked that bank.  I needed cash to pay my mom back.  I invited her to dinner last night and stuck her with the bill for the three pizzas, garlic knots and calamari. As I told her when I handed her the wad and she insisted she didn’t need it: I gotta get you back, otherwise, it would be Fat-Albertian: “It’s like the school in the summer: no class.”  I had a piece of raisin toast and a cup of coffee and chatted for a while, but I was cognizant of the fact that it was Monday morning, and a pile of work was waiting for me, so I sped off back home and listened for a while to the BBC news on NPR, and wondered if I could successfully fake an accent for an entire news program.

 

It’s Monday, as has been mentioned, but fortunately in most countries around the world, including China that means it’s Labor Day and workers, and bosses and everyone else has the day off.  In Japan this is “Golden Week” so there won’t be much activity in any of the countries I’m usually responsible for.  It’s somewhere between misting and drizzling out there and I’ve held off on the heading out for a bike ride and putting fertilizer on these trees I just planted.  Joe Pass is strumming away off to the left, and I allow myself to read  through Euripides ‘Oresetes’ and elicit a gut-augh from my wife with an off-color joke.  This Monday, prolongation of Sunday, hasn’t really been so bad. 

 

 

 

Monday, 05/03/21