November 27 is Jimi Hendrix's birthday, and it is also my birthday. On pretty much any day my first choice would be to play a gig, and I got to play with a jazz trio at the Chelsea Chamber of Commerce after work schmoozefest at the Clocktower complex. Pianist and photographer Andy Sacks leads "Trio Indigo", and Eric Nyhuis played drums.

Some jazz musicians dislike playing in front of a crowd that is largely ignoring them, but among many of my musical colleagues, "furniture music" is not something to be scorned. It is, after all, a gig. I find that jazz often stimulates people to talk anyway. I would as soon have them dancing, talking, and having a good time as staring slack jawed at me as I play.

My other trio, the Dean Solden Trio, performs a blues that Dean calls "Hamp's Blues". The tune is from the album Hampton Hawes Vol. 1: The Trio. I obtained the LP at Encore Music (at a very reasonable price) and it turns out the tune is not "Hamp's Blues", it's "Blues the Most", also a Hawes composition. Some sort of head chart for this tune can be found in the "Library of Musicians' Jazz" fakebook, and I will upload that page shortly. Here is the LP, complete with BIG cover images, in a 60meg RAR download from Rapidshare Hampton Hawes Vol. 1: The Trio.

Sad to say the turntable connected to my computer is on the blink so I had to record the LP onto a cassette and then play the cassette and record on the computer's line in. It's a good album though.