“My job is very boring, I'm an office clerk”
10 Things: Echo Beach, Todd's and other lists, Grammys and jazz crimes, fulsome coverage, Sarah Hanahan returns, Kaia Kater
I still enjoy doing this format after trying it out for a month. Are you cool with it?
I've been working as hard as I can while also being a hermit for the past week – not a bad week for it to snow! – so these are the notes of a shut-in, relative to some of January where I was out at a lot of shows. There's a time and place for everything.
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I heard the Tony Wilson / John Korsrud Octet at Zameen Art House last Friday: Brent Mah joined as another saxophonist on top of what I had listed as a septet. The music rocked and rolled but also got sensitive enough to focus the house's attention toward the two guitar veterans Ron Samworth and Wilson in key moments. Neither the horns nor guitars ever got too loud for the small room. My friend Kevin Romain on drums even sounded like he had some headroom for energy and fury.
The group played an arrangement of this song "Echo Beach" by Martha and the Muffins, which I'd describe as new wave, I guess? I'm too young for this. My title for this article is a lyric from the song, and it does not apply to me anymore, thank you very much! The Wilson/Korsrud version drills the main chorus riff into your brain and then washes it away with a respectable amount of noise.
Korsrud has a big show on Thursday featuring his even-larger Absolute Unit ensemble:
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The China Cloud is our latest venue to launch a GoFundMe. "Operation costs, bills, unpredictably slow business during usual high seasons, and infrastructure issues we were dealt all mounted at once to create a type of sudden financial struggle we had not been met with since 2020," they write in the description. They continue:
"We have set our fundraising goal at $20,000. A contribution toward this goal will help us to pay off retroactive rent fees, standard operating bills, and building maintenance costs accrued. This will allow us to settle accounts, get back to ones [sic] and reorganize to effectively create and manage our new business framework."
What's especially tough is they copied that passage verbatim, same dollar amount and all, from their last GoFundMe in 2020. I wish them the best.
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Todd Stewart
I love publishing a 5,000+ word contribution by a passionate fan of the music. Thanks to Todd for doing it again this year. For what it's worth, some of the ones that I listened to the most last year and which appear on his list (and that aren't Cellar albums, which are of course all my favourites) are:
