Prove It, Jazzman

It's like promoting Bill Evans in a world that has long since forgotten what jazz sounds like

A few days ago, a week after our son took a flight back to WA, his real home now, I got it in my head to finally get off my ass and reach out to the only jazz club in this small town to see if they’d be interested in adding my Jazzman to the line-up.

Cue groaning in the audience of fellow jazzmen. IYKYK…

The nice owners — a husband and wife we’ve met while dining at their Turf Club — via IG DM forwarded me to the floor manager who does the booking for live acts. I did my due diligence, came up with as much as I could for her to decide whether my pianist husband was worthy enough to join the line-up.

Ed doesn’t like handling the business side of music. He hates self-promotion. It’s only when I push and prod that he’ll admit he’s played with some names. Some big-ass names. He won’t even praise himself, so I will: the guy is amazing on keys and deserves to be spoken of along with the top jazz pianists of our day.

He also isn’t fond of playing solo, even though he’s done it a million times in a million venues, from clubs to restaurants to casinos, churches, and booze cruises. Like most jazzmen, he prefers a crowd, preferably fellow musicians who can tell jump blues from be bop.

When I told him I was going to try and get him a regular gig at the Turf Club, a newly reopened, refurbished, re-branded fine dining steak house, he visibly blanched, as if I was asking him to sing “Oklahoma” in the middle of downtown Twin Falls.

(He can sing, but hates to.)

Then, he mic-drops the disclaimer I’d long since forgotten: “You didn’t notice if there was a piano at Turf Club, did you?”

Oh shit, that’s right.

More groaning from the piano players in the audience…

“Uh, no.”
“A keyboard sounds different than piano…” he left the rest floating in the uneasy air.

Getting him there is proving to be quite a challenge. Not just his pianist’s mathematical insistence on perfection, but trying to convey to the floor manager just how wonderful my musician husband is for the Turf Club, what a rare find he could be.

She wanted videos of him performing solo, no band, no singers, to get a sense of what he could do for Turf Club diners. The band videos weren’t enough, I suppose.

In the middle of all this, I was also writing the intro to a Q&A about another musician for the Hawai’i musicians union newsletter. Connie Uejio is a long-time union member and the principal harpist for the Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra. Another big name, at least in the islands.

But she means nothing to the people in Twin Falls, ID, much less the people who go to Twin Falls’ Turf Club for a good steak with their raw oysters.

I worried, as I always do, that I wouldn’t have time to finish the feature today, when I also have to clean my C-PAP, take a shower, and make dinner — a new Giada De Laurentiis recipe with shrimp, risotto rice, and Calabrian chili paste — after rolling out of bed at 1 p.m.! And, my leg is acting up since last night, after, probably, walking the dog too far on Tues.

But, as always, I needn’t have worried. I finished the feature in an hour. I can thank my reporter skills for that. I was known at Ka Leo O Hawaii (University of Hawaii’s newspaper) and Ka Leo O Aiea (award-winning, “Most Improved” Aiea High School newspaper) for my speed. I could write four to seven straight-news articles in under an hour.

Grammy-winning jazz vocalist Sara Gazarek (yes, I know her personally) once said, after I sent her a finished feature for review after 20 minutes, “Oh, I forgot how fast you were!”

I’m not going to spell out what I mean here. You get the gist.

Proving someone’s worth to a crowd of strangers who’ve never been, I can do it. I have done it. But I don’t like having to do it. It’s uncomfortable, awkward, and weird, and … redundant. I’m arrogant enough to think, I shouldn’t have to.

The irony here, and there are many, is that my husband — who’s played with Ernie Watts, Freddie Hubbard, Ollie Mitchell, Jimmy Borges, Jo Anne Worley, Pauline Wilson, Benny Rietveld, Pete Christlieb, Tom Scott (Carole King’s original "Jazzman"), and Maggie Herron — isn’t at all excited to play jazz at the Turf Club if they don’t have a piano on-premises, and not if it’s solo.

The man who sells out shows at Jazz Alley, when he’s with popular Nearly Dan’s Steely Dan tribute band, who once played organ for the Islanders baseball team at Aloha Stadium every game, who performed in the orchestra of Carole King’s pre-Broadway musical “Beautiful,” as well as many, many high school musicals of his day, who’s appeared in countless major recordings for many major, original, amazing artists, etc. ... that man? … is too good for any club that has to ask what he can play.

No offense.

But we’re not playing that game.

“…Welcome to the big time, you're bound to be a star
And even if you don't go all the way, I know that you'll go far…”

— “Don’t Mean Nothin’,” Richard Marx