inside

outside

THE GREEN MILL - CHICAGO, IL - January 14th, 2008
It is the dead of winter in the Midwest.  My Quartet has just finished a recording called "The Cole Porter Mix" for Blue Note.  It will be out in the spring.  I was teaching in Berkeley. We did some big concerts and so now is the time to regroup and rest.  Here we are tonight at the Green Mill in Chicago.

RUSSIA

Dec. 8, 2006
Music Hall Theatre, Aleksandrovosky Park - St. Petersburg

Dec. 9, 2006
International House of Music - Kosmodamianivskaya, MOSCOW

Russia is special. It is enormous, much bigger in every way than one can imagine.
It is coming on economically as a powerhouse. It is full of contradictions, the bureaucracy of the old and the buoyancy of the new.
There is such beauty in Russia it is impossible to describe until you see it. The aesthetic is unique, the colors against the white sky are pastels, the buildings are peppermint, pink, pale yellow and robin's egg blue. No place on earth looks like this.
We had two wonderful concerts in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The audiences are some of the most knowledgeable and attentive music fans in the world. From the stage I confessed that I had been apprehensive at first about bringing cutting-edge modern jazz to Russia, but then had remembered the musical tradition of the Russian composers. I started listing them...."Tchaikovksy, Rachmaninoff, Mussorgsky"... the audience started shouting out with pride...."Prokofiev, Glinka, Scriabin, etc"....reassuring me that we could play anything in Russia and they would understand.
This "Mythologies" tour of Europe was charmed and wildly successful. It was long, easy and not easy. Our soundman and tour manager, Jay ten Hove, has been voted MVP by the band; he managed to overcome great obstacles in getting us from place to place and at the same time conquered soundscapes from tiny clubs to huge auditoriums, keeping me in good voice for five weeks.
The PBQ, PB, Michael, Eric, Neal, and soundman extraordinaire, Jay, now a very tight and proud unit after playing to sold-out venues all over Europe and being called by the London Times the best working group in jazz, will appear at the Green Mill this coming Monday, December 18th, a wonderful holiday homecoming. 11 photos to finish off the Road News for the 11 songs from the record and the "Mythologies, Europe Tour of '06."

Again, this performance space looked like a warehouse turned into a theatre. Very cool. We have waited a long time to get to Germany and have looked forward to it. We changed up the set tonight because it was time, it had been a long travel and performance day so I needed to keep things as fresh as I could. We changed "Caravan" from 5 to 4. I asked everybody to leave the stage except Eric at the beginning of "Like J. T." and we still managed to get in many tunes from "Mythologies."
It is gratifyiing to find fans holding "Mythologies" in their hands as soon as I arrive at a venue and also after the show.
Normally its more difficult to get photos of Eric as he is farther away from me on stage and the lighting on him unfortunately isn't usually as good as it should be. This night, he had a perfect golden halo so I got some good shots of him. You can see why I love the musicians wearing black.. Their faces, arms, hands and instruments show up beautifully.

One would have to admit that after Monte Carlo and the Hotel de Paris, it wasn't easy to get onto another plane and go to another hotel and another concert. Nonetheless, these people were there, and made it a pleasure. I slept 22 hours straight after arriving yesterday (its way easier to go from major capital to major capital) and I switched up the sets to wake us all up. This is another great club on the ourskirts of a big city. It makes one wonder why Chicago or New York can't take advantage of their dilapidated train stations and put in cultural centers.......oh...that's right...lack of public funding..... Great night in Switzerland.

The Hotel Kummer, with dark wood, doilies and impeccable service, has a strangely comforting sense that the year 2006 only exists outside its walls. Hotel bars hold a special place in a traveler’s heart... In the morning one takes an espresso there, in the evening, a drink to unwind.
This small and elegant hotel bar with polished ebony surface is recessed, two marble steps down from the lobby, perfectly attended, and perfectly quiet. Austria is very different than anyplace we have played so far. It has an indelible old world stamp. Porgy and Bess is another fabulous club, this with a 9 ft. Fazioli piano! And it was another two-set sold-out performance.
The next day I slept until 2:30pm. As i was leaving the hotel about 5:00 pm, a beautiful young man with long blond hair, looking like Thomas Mann’s Tadzio from “Death in Venice,” told me he had been waiting there since 10:00am for an autograph. The Hotel Krummer definitely has a storybook quality.

We were robbed on the train from Paris to Amsterdam. The heist was brilliantly executed, like a magic show. Two men walking down the aisle of the train dropped coins; while we were looking down, they were stealing our computer bags from right over our heads. We made police reports; we received strange phone calls asking for money from our own cell phones which had been in the bags. Our niece Hilary lives in Amsterdam, she is a famous actress at Boom Chicago, a Second City European extension. She came to the rescue bringing us food and beer the first night and the second day helped us reconstruct pieces of what had been stolen. As we cut off telephone numbers, bank accounts, plane tickets, credit cards etc. We still had one of the best concert experiences in Amsterdam at the Bimhuis.
Amsterdam is a kaleidoscope of old and new....cutting-edge modern in color and style. At the Bimhuis we did two sets... This has a different shape than the usual one long set so I ’ve taken to starting the second set with a ‘suite’ of “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Eric and I start together.. I love this textural change.. Just piano and drums, and then Michael does a solo, then Neal and we tag a brief section to finish together. Most of the set was “Mythologies.” I was not hesitant to give Amsterdam the most adventurous musical material. The show was received well, the sound and piano in the Bimhuis extraordinary.

Paris is like the prized gem in your collection. The New Morning is packed; one must peel off any unnecessary layers of clothes in order to survive the crowds and the attendant heat. And then everything is magic.
The photo is of the camera crew filming me taking pictures of them near the Hotel du Nord in the afternoon before the set. The next photo is of Budd, my near and dear road companion and hairdresser who will leave tomorrow, and my dear niece Hilary, who is a busy actress at Boom Chicago in Amsterdam, and came here to be with us. We celebrated after this long day.

Ronnie Scott’s..... I admit to being slightly undone by the confusion that reigns here. For this reason, having been given the choice, I chose the early sets. We did our best to bring a very modern jazz sound to a traditional club. The sweet lady sitting in front with her fingers in her ears... I got used to warning her when the loud music was coming.
We worked out a system which she thanked me for later. Ronnie Scott’s is a bit like a jazz circus, nonetheless an institution that supports jazz and seems to be very successful, so I wish them long success. They did put us up in lovely accommodations in the Bloomsbury section of London where all the bookstores are and i am grateful.

My memories of London will be about food. I stumbled upon what looked like a peaceful place to read a book and try some wonderful cuisine. But the door into the restaurant had no doorknob. Looking for another way in, I ran into the head chef, Juliet Peston, in the alleyway next door. She kindly brought me around and said, “No, there is no doorknob...just push.” It turns out she and this restaurant are quite the toast of the town... Her clientele - many distinguished English businessmen and women as well as Yoko Ono and Jeanne Morreau. I sat in my corner and read... quietly. The head chef, on the third day sat down with me and we had a nice chat. I will always appreciate her hospitality, letting a naive American crash lunch 3 days in a row without reservations. She gave me peace that Idesperately needed to face Ronnie Scotts night after night. An example of the food the first day: parsnip soup ,
partridge with foie gras and black pudding on lentils and finely shredded sauerkraut panna cotta with lemon pound cake and muscadet grapes.

This is the north of Spain that I remember and love from our visit to Ponte Vedra. Ourense is elegant, built entirely of stone, much like Nimes, France. The churches loom large as landscape and the entire town structure and material seem to emanate from them.
Built onto and within this same stone are sidewalks, shops, apartments with noble designs, patios, high ceilings, tall windows, and restaurants tucked into every nook and cranny. But also, everywhere in Spain is new architecture.. They must be the leading architectural showplace in the world. (photo is of a bridge in Ourense)
We played at the Cafe Latina. The club is small. Eric couldn’t fit his bongos, Michael had to reduce a flap on his electric string bass, Neal stood on the stairs, and I kept my eyes on the music so I didn’t have to look at the crush of people. Wonderful place and night.