The last of our three consecutive weeks of travel took us to New York to accompany Clorinda on her visit to watch our niece, Sophia, perform in an off Broadway play. We arrived a few hours before Clorinda and visited the “Black Tail” restaurant in Battery Park. This is run by the folks who have the “Dead Rabbit” close to my work office in the Wall Street area – it was named the best cocktail bar in the world and so we had high hopes of “Black Tail”.
The cocktail menu was very cleverly constructed as a multi chapter novel and had lots to choose from. My favorite was the “Doctor Zhivago”. The place had a Cuban theme including décor and menu options. A highly recommended stop for a great craft cocktail and good views of the Statue of Liberty from outside.
For Friday lunch we tried “Craft”, a restaurant by the celebrity chef Tom Collichio. They have a 3 course prix fixe lunch menu that we all thoroughly enjoyed. The duck liver mousse appetizer was a highlight. Clorinda enjoyed tasting the desserts. The restaurant had a nice relaxed feel while the food and service were very well done.
On Saturday we took Clorinda to the top of the Empire State Building. Diana sprung for VIP tickets and we avoided the very long lines for the elevators. The views were quite spectacular and everyone enjoyed the visit very much. The ladies opted for a pedi-cab ride back to the hotel. It’s been about 25 years since I was up in the Empire State Building – the last time was on a work trip from San Antonio to install computer systems in Pennsylvania. That was the same trip that I surprised my Uncle Scott and Aunt Evelyn at the Ottsville Inn.
Clorinda went to watch Sophia’s first performance on Saturday night and so we tried a restaurant that Diana had picked from those participating in New York restaurant week named “Batard”. This was our best dining experience in a long time. The place is located in Tribeca and has one Michelin star (not that you would know from their advertising or menus – it’s just a small award in the window). We had foie gras and steak tartare to start and both were phenomenal. Then duck and lamb to follow – Diana’s lamb was the best I’ve tasted. The service and atmosphere were just what we like. We’ll certainly be back as soon as we can.
After dinner we tried to go to Small’s tiny cellar jazz club but it was full and so we opted for the late show at the Village Vanguard. This is the place that I like to go to on Monday night when they have the Vanguard orchestra. On Saturday they had a three piece band without any names I recognized and a “special guest”. The guest turned out to be Joshua Redman – perhaps the best living saxophonist. We both really enjoyed the show and Diana was able to share some of her left over champagne with the star of the show and his friends.
All three of us attended the matinee of Sophia’s show titled “Show and Tell” on Sunday. The show was very well done – particularly considering the short rehearsal time the kids from all over the country had together. Sophia had one of two leading parts and so we got to enjoy a lot of her singing and acting.
A picnic in Central Park was our plan for Sunday afternoon. We got off to a dodgy start as the subway train didn’t stop where we expected at 81st street and our next option was 125th street in Harlem. We quickly came back down to Columbus Circle on the next train, picked up some sandwiches and headed into the south area of the park for our picnic. A short ramble after lunch took us past the carousel, baseball fields and “Library Walk” which features statues of both Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott.
Birdland jazz club was our destination on Sunday evening. We saw the Birdland Latin Jazz Orchestra which was in the midst of a five week Sunday residency. The music was excellent – mambo and salsa style and the band was very well rehearsed and together. Here’s a video of the rhythm section getting a workout. I hadn’t been to Birdland before and was very pleasantly surprised by the white table cloths, food, service, sound and room to move around the tables.
After the show we stopped into a cocktail bar in the Intercontinental hotel 
across from the club. The craft cocktail performance making the “Smoking Sipper” was quite something as was the presentation. We met a few interesting characters at the bar – a former McKinsey consultant from Dallas and a couple from Canada who had owned and worked in the “Horseshoe” – 
apparently the most famous music club in Canada. The club owner was named “X-Ray” and told us a story about the Rolling Stones playing his 180 person club.
Travel home for us on Monday was smooth (after the horrible traffic into LaGuardia airport with the construction) but Clorinda didn’t fare so well with multiple cancelled flights and redirection to Cleveland rather than Akron. It was very late when she finally arrived at her destination in Wooster, Ohio.
I finished the book “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles this week. Amusingly the lady across the aisle from me on our flight home was reading the same book and was at about the same place. We had a nice chat about how much we were both enjoying being transported to Russia in the early 20th Century. The book details the exploits of Count Alexander Rostov after the Russian revolution and his “house arrest” in the Metropol hotel. The Count spends more than 40 years in the hotel and finds ways to pass his time, ultimately becoming the head waiter of the excellent restaurant in the hotel. This was a very interesting view into a period and location in history that I don’t know a lot about. A couple of favorite quotes:
“his fingers were half an inch longer than the fingers of most men his height. Had he been a pianist, Andrey could easily have straddled a twelfth. Had he been a puppeteer, he could have performed the sword fight between Macbeth and Macduff as all three witches looked on. But Andrey was neither a pianist nor puppeteer – or at least not in the traditional sense. He was the captain of the Boyarsky, and one watched in wonder as his hands fulfilled their purpose at every turn.”
“As the willow studied the Count, he noted that the arches over her eyebrows were very much like the marcato notation in music – the accent which instructs one to play a phrase a little more loudly. This, no doubt, accounted for the willow’s preference for issuing commands and the resulting huskiness of her voice”
I heard the song “Senor Blues” by Taj Mahal this week and was taken with its combination of jazz and blues – particularly on the piano part. Some research showed this to be the 36th album from Taj Mahal, released in 1997, and with the fabulous Jon Cleary (an Englishman who has lived in New Orleans for many years that I’ve had the pleasure of listening to several times) on piano.
The oldest of nine children, Taj Mahal was born in Harlem to a gospel-singing schoolteacher mother and a West-Indian born composer-arranger father who was a big jazz fan. So from his youth Taj Mahal was immersed in the music which would become his career. He writes that his father had a short-wave radio, and when young Taj was growing up, he was able to tune in to styles from all over the world. Later, his heroes would be American blues masters like Mississippi John Hurt, Sleepy John Estes, Big Mama Thornton, plus rock & roll pioneers like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. In his college years at the University of Massachusetts, before his graduation in 1964 with a degree in animal husbandry, Taj had an R&B band playing on campus. Then he turned professional after graduation, co-founding a group with fellow blues aficionado (and one of my most favorite guitar players) Ry Cooder called The Rising Sons.
Having finished my book on jazz, I picked up a new “car book” – the book 
I keep in the car for a quick and light read if I stop for coffee or have to wait for someone or something for a few minutes – titled “The Olivetti Chronicles – Three Decades of Life and Music” by John Peel. Peel was a late night Radio 1 DJ in England when I was growing up and I love the walks down memory lane that his short stories provide. Here are a couple of snippets:
From “Kenny Dalglish” in the Guardian, 12 August 1994
“Of course, we were well aware of Kenny’s abilities long before he came to Anfield. I stood on the Kop for his first home game and we warmed to him in a way that we had never really warmed to Keegan. The most impressive of his abilities in those early matches was the way he seemed to know where every player was at all times. Even a superb Liverpool squad, by far the greatest team the world has ever seen, took a few weeks to catch up with Kenny’s speed and anticipation”
From “Tubular Bells” in The Listener, 7 June 1973
“With Tubular Bells we have a record that does quite genuinely cover new and uncharted territory. Without borrowing anything from established classics or descending to the discords, squeals and burps of the determinedly avant-garde, Mike Oldfield has produced music which combines logic with surprise, sunshine with rain. In the process of so doing he plays a bewildering range of musical instruments without ever playing merely for effect.”
Finally, a couple of other songs I heard this week and really enjoyed. A cover of “Hey Joe” by Jerry Douglas, the amazing dobro player from Nashville.
And a song from the upcoming release from “The War on Drugs”. I’m looking forward to listening to the whole album.