Mike’s Digital Laboratory

Monday night was just amazing:

• Mamadou Diabate Ensemble
• 4 Brothers 7
• Midaircondo
• Dan Hicks & The Hot Licks
• Robin Eubanks EB3

The award for the most eclectic, far out-space-jazz, jamming, experimental avant-garde femme fatale group is definitely Midaircondo. Complete with video of giant amoebas and out of focus people floating in swimming pools. These two genius beauties decked out in grey dresses, and combat boots occasionally picked up there sax and bass flute in between mad scientist like experimental electronics emanating from a large pile of boxes and wires they shared between them.

The tones of Midaircondo clashed in my brain as I had previously come from probably one of the highlights of the entire festival. Once you see Mamadou nothing else matters. Mamadou’s truly original african music is nothing like you have ever heard. It will heal your mind as it tickles your intellect and reaches wayyyyy down inside your soul and touches you in a musical place you have never been. This I know.

I stayed home with the kids tonight but Stefanie took my club pass and went out with her mom. She just got home, so here’s the midnight report.

• Fred Hersch Trio
• Cornelio Tutu
• Lalo

Stef says the best vibes go out to Lalo, “Ethereal, upbeat, perky, the happiest band I ever saw”.

I forgot to mention Friday night we also stayed out late to go to the open Jam at the Crowne Plaza. Excellent time. John Nugent (the festival producer) showed up to play with the hosts Bob Sneider Trio.  And there we saw Esperanza Spalding in the crowd, but she didn’t sing. (Darn).

Last night’s music (Saturday night) . We arrived later than usual but still managed to pack in a lot of music:

• Ryan Shaw
• Shuffle Demons
• Zanussi 5
• Paul Tillotson Love Trio
• Tiempo Libre

My Favorite, Well shufflle Demons win for the coolest outfits. But the Zanussu 5 just blew me away with trippy nordic space jam sax madness. And whoda thunk vikings could play klez.

2007 Rochester International Jazz Festival - Club passes… check, Schedule for 9 days of cool… check, Cool jazz berets… Check, Ready to rock… check! Here’s the lineup we saw last night

• Geri Allen Trio featuring Jimmy Cobb
• Peter Asplund Quartet
• Mike Mainieri & Steps Ahead
• Jonathan Kreisberg Trio
• Esperanza Spalding

My favorite of the night was Mike Mainieri & Steps Ahead. In the first set monster powered Sax solos by Bill Evans just burned up the stage and in the second set some sort of mad genius energy just took over the band and… whoa.

Well it’s only been about two years of blogger dormancy… Don’t know why, can’t explain it. Wont. But here you go. Odds an ends I find on the internet. Things I create and share and the occasional rant. Got to have those.

And now I fiddle with Wordpress and I’m hosted. No more Linux box in the basement. I’ve got scads of bandwidth and tons of storage. Seems tooo good to be true. I’ll let those nice people at Dreamhost manage my box. The novelty of hacking my own Linux server has worn off and I’m happy, no ecstatic to let someone else worry about back up, power, connectivity, etc. blah blah blah woo hoo!