2009 - one man's highlights

By Robbie on January 1, 2010

This site! The revamped rf.com was launched last February. Its wintry whiteness is a feast for the eye. Also it's designed to be easier for me to manipulate personally, rather than using the webmasters as intermediaries. So I've been able to be more frequent with my home-page rants, treatises, observations, and self-promotions, allowing me to improve as a writer, the site to enhance its value, and the Internet to teem with my negativity. An unforeseen benefit to this visibility, and probably the richest one, is that I get to hear from some of the musicians I write about, and thereby forge a few new relationships with people I've admired from a distance. So -- look out for my piece on Rihanna next week.

When we moved to Brooklyn at the top of the year now past, we enrolled our nine- and eleven-year-old sons in two of the borough's top-ranked public schools. Well, who knows what the lowest-ranked schools are like; this extended encounter with big-city government services turned out, on the whole, to be a gloomy trawl. But one nice result of my kids' academic overpreparedness was that the younger one won his school's chess tournament and the other the spelling bee, or more accurately, eco-spelling bee. I imagine he had to spell words like "sustainability" and "Prius" and "meatismurder," and I say that I imagine because I wasn't there at the contest, but in...

Sweden! That was just as much fun as squatting nightly in an industrial compound and being driven hundreds of miles daily over the freezing and overcast countryside by a chain-smoking knife-scarred James Bond villain can be. I'm excited to return in two months.

Drinking hard, exercising hard. Both offer great sensual delight -- one during but not after and the other after but not during -- but one feels a bodily need, in middle age, to assign a distinct temporal zone to each. My normal, stringently maintained regimen is to black out on weekends and work out on the other days, but this year all routine was disrupted, as we moved, in the dead of winter, from the town with the nearby gym I'm accustomed to, to a great big beautiful hub of decadence, with cute little liquor stores on every block. So this year I drank hard for seven straight months and exercised for five.

The musical highlight of the year for me, as you probably won't be surprised to hear, was getting to play, write, and gig on a steady basis with Jenny Scheinman. For some years I had been listening to her records, and to her playing on Bill Frisell's, with the wonderment and fascination that one musician may have for another whose ideas and sound are appealing but whose training and evolved values have landed her in some neck of the woods that's remote. More simply -- two barriers were that I was more interested in than fluent in her musical language, and someone who plays jazz and lives in Brooklyn is twice removed from my camp. Well, moving to her hood took down one barrier, and when it transpired that she was about as interested in picking Jimmie Driftwood and Alvin Crow tunes as I was in picking her brain, we were off to the races. Jenny is, as our mutual friend Robbie Gjersoe aptly summed her up, "a motherfucker." I'm delighted to be laying out more duo work and recording for us in the coming year, and hope to play with her for many years to come.

Another broad I enjoyed making music with in 2009 was Nora O'Connor. Wait, is this boring to read about how wonderful everything was? Okay, my van was broken into in Philadelphia and the thieves made away with, of all things, some of the half-inch master tapes for my Michael Jackson tribute record, how's that? Now back to Nora. Not only does she sing beautifully, her attitude toward life and performance is exemplary -- Danny Barnes said that when she's onstage, she acts like she's shopping at the supermarket. I sang with Nora in Milwaukee, Akron, Carbondale, Newport KY, and twice in Madison, and am plotting more outings for 2010. She has the best ipod of anyone I've met.

If I had missed the SCTV reunion at Second City on December 11, I think I would have been haunted by it forever after. So I had to go, was in fact childishly thrilled to go, even though I could have known that seeing Ed Grimley and Count Floyd reincarnated by actors who were, respectively, 59 and 68 years old, might be an experience tinged with melancholy, and that the performance was bound to be underrehearsed and nostalgia-burdened. Two of the nicest moments in the show came when, during involved costume changes, Eugene Levy and Harold Ramis came onstage as themselves and reminisced. I was moved by Joe Flaherty's absolute commitment to his characters, which spoke to his integrity and helped keep the reunionometer out of the red. Martin Short is continually inspirational. And I must say, as one sitting close to the stage, that Andrea Martin looks ravishing, healthy, and better than ever.

In 2009 my basement didn't fill up with rainwater, in itself a highlight.

Here are the places I most enjoyed playing music last year, as well as I can remember without consulting my calendar: The Space in Evanston, Illinois; the Tractor in Seattle; the Barbes in Brooklyn; the Akkurat in Stockholm; Jammin' Java in Arlington, Virginia; the Evening Muse in Charlotte, North Carolina; the Hoogland in Springfield, Illinois; the Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and some farm in western Massachusetts. Here Barrie H. married Steve L., and the most relaxed, enjoyable, and fervently appreciated wedding set I've ever played commenced. We began, as we often do, with a Monk instrumental, to gently announce the advent of musical entertainment and begin the long climb to the point where we can play at a comfortable level and get people dancing. But these people were so strange, so drugged, so something, that they started gyrating like loosed whippets to the opening strains of "Blue Monk." They literally dashed from the dinner tent to the adjoining music tent and started throwing each other in the air, 1930s style. By the midpoint of the presentation, Chris Scruggs was taking over as frontman and attacking Ray Price oldies with juvenile belligerence. By the end I was crooning "Blowing In The Wind" and calling the guests demeaning names just for fun. An excellent night.

Then there was my brother's wedding, near Allentown, Penna. Making my first best-man dinner speech was terrifying but no doubt a boon to my character. If my brother had married an evil, hideous harridan I don't know that it would have bothered me, since I believe that the lives of people who don't live in my house are pretty much theirs to ruin. For all that, I take an odd and inexplicable pride in his having found a first-rate creature to conjugate with. She's like a younger version of my wife, by which I mean no sneaky disrespect, only that the passage of time and the bearing of my children have left my wife wizened and mangy. Jubal's wife comes from a Catholic family, and so the service was long and labored with impenetrable ritual and Latin gobbledygook, but the party after was a blast -- those Catholics can really cut up!

I want to find my 2008 calendar and do the math, but I have the feeling I worked fewer dates and made more money in 2009. Also that life will continue in this happy way, on and on, world without end...so don't go by my feelings.