PETE//HUEY

Category: 40×40

  • 40×40 // 17 – Emer’s Dream (2008)

    We haven’t had a song by the Frames yet, but we’ve had a few contacts with what I’ll term the GHEU (Glen Hansard Extended Universe) already in this series.1 Today’s is the most explicit yet: the showstopping Emer’s Dream from Colm Mac Con Iomaire’s 2008 solo record, The Hare’s Corner.

    Now, remember: it’s late 2007. KT Tunstall hasn’t yet just been on Jools Holland with the legendary looped performance of Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.2 People – ok, people I know, including me – are taking a long hard look at loop pedals, but we’re still a few years pre-Ed Sheeran, so they aren’t mainstream.3 With no fanfare at all, Colm Mac Con Iomaire came out before the rest of the Frames at a gig in the Grand Opera House in October, and played a few tracks off his soon-to-be released album, running his electric violin through a loop station and creating these gigantic, whirling soundscapes.

    Youtube struggles to capture it, as is so often the case, but the sound created a, ‘take it, take my money’ moment.

    Completely tangentially, writing this has reminded me of perhaps my favourite moment in a rehearsal. For me, rehearsals were always the favourite part of a performance: the moment when a band have started to click, or when a new song gives everyone the ‘oooh, that one’s not awful’ feeling, or just little bits of musical magic. I remember playing at a fundraising concert some time after this,4 and was footling around playing the chord sequence from Emer’s Dream on the piano when friend Hannah, playing violin beautifully in that particular outfit, felt moved to start improvising along off the top of her head. In my very brief time attempting to be a jobbing musician (despite how much I nostalgically wallow in it) I got to try out lots of different things, but that little moment, noodling away in an otherwise empty church space, might be my favourite, as that chord sequences and the violin mixed and rose in the air, never to be contained or repeated.

    1. See entries for the pregap and track 04 for more. ↩︎
    2. The lore around said performance – including Tunstall’s late call-up as a replacement, and borrowed equipment – is almost as good as the song itself. ↩︎
    3. Friend Brian, these days a legit singer-songwriter, was the finest user of a proper loop station that I knew, but he was usually to be found in his student digs diligently mastering John Mayer solos over himself as the backing track. ↩︎
    4. The things you remember. We were supporting a fellow called Gentry Morris that evening, who is a fantastic singer and writer. You should watch him and Stephen Macartney sing his song, Awake, O Sleeper, and then go and listen to his album of the same name. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 16 – Wait For It (2015)

    There are few pop culture hills worth dying on – but the admission by Lin-Manuel Miranda that he believes he wrote the best songs for the character of Aaron Burr encourages me to make this particular stand: Burr’s searing inner monologue, Wait For It, is the best song in the musical phenomenon Hamilton, and yes, I will die on that hill.1

    It is so significant that when Hrishikesh Hirway’s SongExploder briefly made the jump to Netflix for a (too) limited-run series, Wait For It was the track grabbed out of the zeitgeist to go under the microscope.2

    In the musical’s libretto, it’s perhaps one of only a couple of glimpses into Burr’s otherwise stonewall persona: a moment when the facade drops, and the man’s motivations are exposed.

    Whilst a particular line –

    Death doesn’t discriminate
    Between the sinners and the saints
    It takes and it takes and it takes

    …might be read as exposing a type of fatalism, I have often chosen to read it instead as a tenet of faith – death, which none of us can escape, is not only the great leveller but also a reminder that so many things in this plane of existence, which may seem vital at the time, are just dust.

    1. Allow me to shoehorn in here an honourable mention for the cover, by Ben Folds and Regina Spektor, of Burr’s other moment of vulnerability: Dear Theodosia. ↩︎
    2. The podcast SongExploder is brilliant, and will feature again – the Netflix series can be found here. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 15 – Next Year (1999)

    Inching towards academic deadlines at the end of this month, 40×40 has not been getting the attention I would like. However, setting aside such distractions, and reviewing recent posts, one can spot a minor trend in recent entries which is crying out for resolution – that is, songs that primarily emerged from TV watching habits in the early 2000s.

    A footnote to an earlier post discussed the incredible run that was RTE 2’s (then Network 2) Monday night comedy lineup; today, a tip-of-the-hat is due to the UK’s Channel 4’s morning setup. The weekday early morning run of that time is legendary: on any given morning you could be watching Cheers, Frasier, Friends (heavily edited for the time slot), and if you missed the school bus, King of Queens or Everybody Loves Raymond. However, hang around until later morning and there might be ER, criminally-underrated procedural Without a Trace, and the sweetest of all early 2000s comedy-dramas: Ed.

    Ed remains slightly mythical for having never made it to DVD due to musical rights issues – a trap into which many pre-streaming shows fell.1 A vehicle for future stars Tom Cavanagh and Julie Bowen, the small town aw-shucks-fest mixed schmaltz with belly-laughs, but the soundtrack was a highlight – no more so than the original track for the opening credits: Foo Fighters’ album track, Next Year.

    Aged around 13, I knew Nirvana from my older cousin’s cassette tapes,2 but hadn’t yet discovered the Foos; watching Ed led to purchasing There is Nothing Left to Lose and my mind falling out of my ears.3 Yet, in contrast to most of the album, Next Year is a gentle lyric, wending its way through an ambling tune to create an audio landscape that perfectly fit the TV show it was used to introduce. This track and that album were a gateway into a whole world that part of my nostalgia-tinged brain still lives in. Maybe things will change sometime.

    Maybe next year.

    1. Vulture have a good explainer here. A few years ago, some absolute hero ripped the whole lot from what looks like the broadcast tapes from a local affiliate TV station in the States; the internet overlords have never seen fit to action a takedown, and you can watch the entire run on YouTube with 90s-style VHS flicker. Typical of the era, the finale, four seasons in, is a mess, but the joy along the way is worth it. ↩︎
    2. Like something out of a coming-of-age film, my cousin Seline spent a summer in our house and commandeered my cassette player to blast Nevermind on a daily basis, and her (maybe ten year old?) cousin was absolutely on board. Her most played track was not, as I remember, Smells Like Teen Spirit, but definitely In Bloom. ↩︎
    3. Dave Grohl’s best album. It’s been self-pastiche ever since; often enjoyable, but still a bit of a parody at times. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 14 – These Photographs (2006)

    Whisper it – of all the millennial properties being revived in these current times, the reboot of Scrubs has bucked the trend and been both fresh and familiar in equal measure.1 (Frankly, I’m gutted there are only nine episodes in the first run). Admittedly, I am absolutely the target audience: it first hit TV when I was finishing school,2 and the boxsets came with me through uni (alternating purchases with series of The West Wing).

    Among the many things to like was, famously, the sound tracks, as mentioned in a previous post in this series.3 Music was used both in and out of camera to amazing effect – Colin Hay’s cameo might be the best example. But perhaps the greatest beneficiary was Zack Braff’s bestie, Joshua Radin, whose music is synonymous with some of the shows most famous moments.4 Scrubs, therefore, was also a gateway into Joshua Radin’s music; I was tempted to pick something from his (unusually upbeat) third album, Road to Ride On, but the Scrubs connection anchors us in the first record, and so I’m going for These Photographs.

    Radin specialises in breathy, heart-felt and quiet songs – and he’s very good at it5 – but I often think its a pity as his more up-tempo tracks, primarily limited to his second and third album, very on high quality pop. These Photographs sits somewhere in-between; I’ve always enjoyed the wordplay of the verses, casting various historical literary figures in a way that could feel very heavy-handed, but I think manages to say the right side of sincere. The album, We Were Here, is well worth a spin.

    1. Disney Plus in the UK – I’ve loved it. ↩︎
    2. It was on Channel 4 in the UK, but was also part of a frankly obscene Monday night lineup on Network 2 in Ireland, were us dual-nationals in the north could also tune in to see lots of US comedies weeks ahead of their UK screenings. At one point, the run was something like: That 70s Show, followed by Scrubs, followed by Friends, followed by Father Ted. Today, in a streaming world, no-one would raise an eyebrow, but at the time, there was nothing like it. ↩︎
    3. Let’s shoehorn in two things here: firstly, the show’s theme song itself, Superman by Lazlo Bane, and some lovely banjo; and secondly, you can’t mention Scrubs and music and not take a moment to pour one out for the amazing Sam Lloyd and his a cappella group, The Blanks. ↩︎
    4. Season 3, Episode 14 – ‘My Screw Up’. ↩︎
    5. Paperweight is a good example, from the soundtrack to The Last Kiss, an excellent – and forgotten – genre-twisting rom-com from the Scrubs extended universe. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 13 – A Praise Chorus (2001)

    At friend Dave’s 40th birthday party last weekend, one of the first tracks on the generated ‘Indie Rock 2000s’ playlist was Do You Want To? by Franz Ferdinand. When we were roommates over two decades ago, the first two Franz Ferdinand records were on heavy rotation in Dave’s CD changer – along with Floggin’ Molly and Dropkick Murphys – and though I was never a massive fan, the time we went to see them in November 2005 was one of the all-time great concerts in terms of crowd participation. Those art-rockers knew how to work a big room; the bounce for that song was something else.

    It got me musing on other great gig moments. I’ve never been a massive gig-goer – certainly not arena-sized ones where you’re basically watching a big screen. Foy Vance was on the BBC recently getting misty-eyed about the Rotterdam Bar;1 it is incredible that we used to be able to wander across town and, for the price of a pint, sit in that wee dark room and watch artists like Foy or Duke Special doing their thing. Other favourites from that era included the Frames at the Ulster Hall, Dave Matthews in the Waterfront2 – sonically, a perfect match of artist and venue – Oppenheimer in a beer tent3, and Bell X1 at the old Mandela Hall. Then I stopped: the best Mandela Hall gig of all (in my time): Jimmy Eat World.

    For a long time, Work sat at the top of my last.fm all-time charts (before they were destroyed by my children’s access to Spotify); but as I mused on, there’s only one choice: the collision of lyrical precision and genius with the sweaty guitars of A Praise Chorus.

    The most recent time I saw Jimmy Eat World, it was getting to that slightly annoying stage where you could barely hear the band over an entire room full of people shouting every single word back at them – but on reflection, this is really just a testament to how, for a very specific age bracket of millennial, this band were seminal. That swell of guitars and the perfect production mix of vocals over the top – there’s so much going on, as the live video above hints, but on the album, Bleed American, you can hear every part.

    A later post in May-time will pick up on the music that has been adopted by our kids, but Jimmy Eat World is gladly one of those which our eldest, the drummer, has studied. Long may it continue.

    1. RIP. There’s an appropriate Facebook page of people sharing memories here. ↩︎
    2. For the DMB fans: what a setlist that was. ↩︎
    3. ‘When the city’s awake, you wanna go down to the subway to make your way… UPTOWN…’ An amazing live band. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 12 – Everything You Want (1999)

    When the poster went up outside the Drama department, I walked past it a few days before putting the whole train of thought together. A couple of months earlier, under Bob’s guidance, I’d managed to scrape together enough to buy my first ‘proper’ guitar – a left-handed, dreadnought Tanglewood with a pickup – and had been schlepping it around, still in its cardboard box, to play for youth fellowship and the like.1 But it hadn’t had a proper outing. Eventually, I walked past the poster enough times to think, ‘Well… maybe that would work.’

    At the school open evening, weirdly enough, the pieces came together. Bob was a natural ‘yes’. My friend Caroline’s little brother Bill, who was a few years below but already known for being up for the craic, didn’t take much convincing. We needed a bassist. Friend John said yes, only problem is, he said, I don’t really play. That’s alright, we said; we’ll teach you enough. It’s just one song.

    So we turned up to the launch meeting for this year’s school Stars in Yer Eyes contest, confident and ready to go. A bunch of nerds (plus Johnboi) playing Wheatus’ Teenage Dirtbag. Lead singer’s got glasses, an electro-acoustic guitar and a bucket hat. I own all of these things. People would have a great laugh at it. Home crowd, popular song, what could go wrong?

    The head of drama stuck on a tape of last year’s finals to let everyone get an idea what the standard was like. Then she played the winning finalist from the previous year. This one would be hard to replicate, she said. Definitely don’t try singing this song for a year or two, she laughed.

    It was, of course, some fellas from somewhere singing Teenage Dirtbag.

    Filing out of the room at the end, the sheet was on the table for signing up. Names. Artist. Song.

    Absolute pivot to covering whatever I was singing in my head that week – Vertical Horizon’s Everything You Want.

    Still a great song: only completely on electric – and also, the brilliant lead singer, Matt Scannell – completely bald with a goatee.

    Apart from that, a dead match.2

    Listen, it’s a great song; one of those ones that signals the turn, at the end of the century, melding together the best parts of grunge production and muddier guitars with pop timing and hooks. This sound of a mix personifies a huge part of the music of my teens. But we didn’t look or sound, really, anything like them.

    After winning through the heats (!), alongside future-housemate Julie absolutely smashing Sarah McLachlan’s Angel and Leaky from General Fiasco and a bunch of lads killing it with Sum 41’s In Too Deep (the guitar sound was perfect), we came back for the regional finals. Regionals were different. Heats had been 100% based on the audience vote – if you were ever to see the video of our performance, filmed by someone on their pocket digital camera… well, you can’t make out much, but you’ll hear the shouting. (Alright, I’ll stick it in the footnotes.)3 Home crowd came good for us. But in the regionals, they’d brought in actual judges. And the question came backstage beforehand: ‘So… have you made any effort to look more like the band this time?’

    I felt like saying, no offence, but if I’d actually done that, I’d have been sent home from school the next day for violating the uniform code.

    We missed out on the nationals by one place. All of us were beaten by a girl from another school who, and I’m not exaggerating here, sang Aretha Franklin in blackface. It’s 22 years ago but someone needs to still be hanging their head in shame over that one. Still, the two other acts from our school went to the nationals at the Waterfront, and did us all proud. Rumours backstage were the judges did us dirty, deliberately rating us near-last because, you know, we didn’t actually resemble the artists we were impersonating in any way, shape or form.

    This song makes in on 40×40, not just because it’s a great song – and it is – but because it also marked the beginning of a period of complete addiction to live performance. A period where I would conspire (no pun intended) to be in as many bands, gigs, live situations as possible, chasing that high. And it happened again, though maybe not with such purity on more than a couple of occasions.

    There’s no happy ending really; years later, also with Bob – beautiful symmetry there – I came off a little stage in Belfast and said to myself, this is done. That was about 12 years ago, and it was; and it was the right decision. But wow: does sitting here, thinking about that spring night in 2004 give me the chills. What a roar.

    1. This guitar was first smashed by baggage handlers in Dublin airport on the way to Romania, then smashed again seven years later by baggage handers on the way to West Africa. Moral of the story: buy a case that actually fits your guitar. Then, leave it safely at home and just borrow one when you get there. ↩︎
    2. Found the photo from the local paper. Just a bunch of kids. I have inexplicably left the house wearing a homemade t-shirt, advertising a web cartoon/story series I used to publish on Geocities. Look, the 2000s were wild, folks. ↩︎
    3. Found it. Someone filmed the whole performance. You can’t hear the band, but you sure can hear the spectators! ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 11 – Chinese Satellite (2020) and Found You (2019)

    Another week, another arbitrary rule is bent. Two (companion) tracks this week.

    This week six years ago, in March 2020, the Thing happened. In our house, it was a weird one (OK, so it was weird for everyone). At work, we officially sent everyone home on the 20th, but I had already been working from home for a couple of days because we’d already taken the kids out of school sick. Then the Thing officially happened, and that was it. Most of our staff were furloughed; I would occasionally call down to work to wave at my boss across a room and check the buildings were OK, but once we had (as safely as we could) dealt with all our students and their belongings, we were done.

    My main memory of the first working-from-home phase of the Thing – the bit with the amazing weather here in the UK – was sitting in our front box room, at a makeshift desk, waving across the road at our neighbour PM, sitting in his box room at his makeshift desk, before we both went back to pretending we were just working like normal human beings.

    I pulled up my last.fm profile to see what the comfort music was. A lot of John Mayer. A lot of Nickel Creek. A lot of John Mark McMillan. All these have been mentioned already. But then, at some point, the combination of Youtube Music and Spotify started throwing up new things: some of which, in my head, are now forever enshrined as the soundtrack to the thing,

    There were three albums which dominated for a while. The first, Sean Watkins and the Bee Eaters, This is Who We Are, already got a hat-tip in a previous post and a couple of footnotes in this series.1 But then we morphed into June, and Phoebe Bridgers launched her incredible sophomore album, Punisher. The singles from it are brilliant – but I love Chinese Satellite the most.

    Lockdown. Looking out the window. Feeling numb. Crunching up eyes and trying to make the figures in Excel work so that we can get to the end of Q4 without having to max out an overdraft. Pitching budgets and contingency plans on Zoom. Listening to staff on Zoom for that one time a week they log on. Standing out in the garden in glorious sunshine thinking, this isn’t so bad really, but then remembering that it really is.

    I want to believe,
    Instead, I look at the sky, and I feel nothing
    You know I hate to be alone
    I want to be wrong

    Phoebe Bridgers, in this incredible song summing up her struggles with agnosticism and faith, capturing the hole inside every human being. I’ve used it in a sermon. But I’ve absolutely felt it.2

    But we’re going for a double-A-side this week, because there was another album I was obsessed with just before Punisher came out. I think this ended up in my suggested listening because of a sonic link, somehow, to FRMR’s Inver 3 – the incredible Amish/Appalacian-space-exporatory sonic experience that is Silicone Boone’s The Reaches, and the best track on it – Found You.

    Again, the whole album is really a single piece, and rewards careful listening, but Found You seems particularly profound to me. It also includes the answer to Phoebe Bridgers’ prayer as it points to the truth of something bigger than us which provides meaning, purpose, and a reason to be – even in a moment when it felt like the world was changing forever.

    Well I ain’t worth much, my face is far too common
    You could stack me up, still I’d be forgotten
    I’ve never found a place among the chosen
    Ahh but I rode the wave that gives the world its motion
    Yes, I found you

    You’re why we leave home
    Why we’ve always roamed
    Why we’re not alone

    1. But it’s great. Another mention for their cover of Graceland, but the whole album is one that rewards listening to it as an album. ↩︎
    2. Phoebe Bridgers’ first album, Stranger in the Alps, is good, but the 2019 concept album with Connor Oberst, Better Oblivion Community Center, is great: the lead single, Dylan Thomas, should really be on 40×40. Now it’s here, I can add it to the Spotify playlist regardless. ↩︎
    3. FRMR will be the subject of a future entry in this series, so we’ll not say too much for now. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 10 – Closed Hand, Full of Friends (2013)

    This week, with 17 March on the horizon, the thought passed through my mind of celebrating some of the Celtic-punk that my friend and uni roommate loved blasting at all hours.1 But then local media this week has been blanketed with the marketing for Foy Vance’s new album, The Wake, and that started the internal debate about a favourite Foy song – and the winner was the opening track from 2013’s sensational Joy of Nothing, the triumphant Closed Hand, Full of Friends.

    The pounding, urgent piano riff throughout is one of my favourite sounds in all music.

    I met Foy, briefly, around about 2011; I say, ‘met’ – I nearly took his head off as I span around with a big camera bag over my shoulder, not realising he had just slipped through the stage door behind me. He took it well and we had a quick chat. I was fascinated, some years earlier, when he had popped up (almost uncredited)on the original Organic Hymnal EP released by the mass, Bangor-Elim-adjacent Rend Collective Experiment:2 Vance sings an incredible vocal line on the closing track, Send Me – in fact, although I haven’t been including two videos in-post in this series so far, you should here it.

    Foy, the preacher’s son, sang this beautiful, aching track of faith; a faith he openly wrestled with and, by his own account, is tied up on the relationship with his father which dominates his music. From memory, he took the compliment but didn’t want to delve into it too much then and there. His first full album, Hope, was huge – the fact that, when we were undergrads, we could walk across town to see Foy and others in The Rotterdam,3 and his music had ended up being on these big US TV shows, was an inspiration.4

    Foy Vance has many, many great songs – at this exact moment, this is my favourite.

    1. Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys. And if you think you’ve never heard of them, what about this one from the FIFA 2005 soundtrack? Flogging Molly’s 2004 album Within A Mile of Home (Spotify link here) is worthy of your time. ↩︎
    2. Rend released two EPs before they were signed, and some of the tracks made it onto the first major release. The launch night, in the Black Box, felt like it had as many people on stage as on the floor – I can’t remember when it was, but it was absolute chaos. A band I was in had previously supported Numinous, which original Rend lynchpins Steve and Gareth Gilkinson had been part of, but the styles were… different! ↩︎
    3. The Rotterdam (RIP) was mad. You had Foy Vance and Ken Haddock on one night; you might have had Duke Special the next. And these people were actual musicians, in this brilliant, tiny, dingy pub in Sailortown. We didn’t know how good we had it. What a loss. ↩︎
    4. See also: the moment Bell X1’s sumptuous Eve, The Apple of My Eye was on Grey’s Anatomy or whatever. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 09 – Easy Lover (Live) (1990)

    Twenty years or so ago, an existential question came up regularly. I was the frontman of the band I was in almost by default; didn’t it seem a bit weird having the short, hairy guy doing the singing? Shouldn’t he be tucked away behind the drum kit or something?

    To which one can at least reply: but Phil Collins.1

    Even though this week’s track originally appeared as a single two years before the range for this project, we will expand the rules a little for this bait-and-switch because the primary – and best – exposure to this and many other Phil Collins tracks comes through the vehicle of the Brit Award-nominated Serious Hits… Live!, an album that I borrowed from my father a few decades ago and kept around.2 Collins walks a very fine line between cheesy 80s idiosyncrasy, and some of the tightest and finest pop production you are ever going to hear. The massive Serious Hits tour came at the height of his powers: a massive production, and a band with the chops to match the theatrics.3

    Collins, as a person and as a musician, is as divisive as the film American Psycho – which features a legendary monologue about his work – but this music simply slaps.

    Around about 2010, we had a group ski trip to France, unironically soundtracked, depending on which car you were seated in, by either the audio album of Dylan Moran’s Monster, or Phil Collins’ Greatest Hits. This was after the Cadbury’s advert featuring the Gorilla and In the Air Tonight, so Phil was in the mid of 20-somethings beyond the long-term listeners. But for me, the live recordings of these songs simply out punch the studio versions: there’s something about the energy. Even though Easy Lover comes late in the track listing (track 14 of 15), the energy carries through thanks to a late run on the album that includes, You Can’t Hurry Love into Two Hearts into Sussudio – that’s a lot of funk for Side 2!

    I love it: a tight band, a hyped crowd, and a group of vocalists having the time of their lives – I hope it brightens your day too.

    1. This is as far as this comparison legitimately goes! ↩︎
    2. I was less successful in shoplifting his Graceland LP, but mentioning Paul Simon gives me an opportunity to get You Can Call Me Al onto our Spotify playlist by including it here, so you’re welcome. ↩︎
    3. After you’re done here, you can stick on a remastered version of the entire concert film here. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 08 – Girl of My Dreams (2000)

    Dr H’s birthday present gift to yours truly in 2007 was a little left-field, but not really: tickets to see Harry Connick, Jr., on his ‘My New Orleans Tour‘, at the Waterfront Hall. Harry Connick became embedded somewhere in my mind from repeat watches of Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s great When Harry Met Sally,1 for which he provided the soundtrack album at age, what… 22?2 So off we went to see Harry and marvel at his patented screen-based sheet music system.3

    At some point, Harry calls forward trombonist Lucien Barbarin to play a couple of solos. Then Barbarin sits down on the edge of the stage, and sings the old standard Girl of My Dreams, his legs swinging, with a big grin on his face – and had the whole Hall eating out of the palm of his hand. It was sensational, and it looked so easy.

    After purchasing the album and scouring its depth, it became clear that Barbarin was an absolute legend of New Orleans music in his own right. To his credit, Harry Connick packed his band out with pros, which either speaks to ego or to respect for the tradition – I’m going to choose the latter. But Barbarin, this tall, gangly, serene gentleman with this unassuming manner and silky voice, stole the show.

    He was duking it out with a couple of other New Orleans musicians to make this list – Trombone Shorty4 an extremely close number 2 – but my love of this song alone places him on the list. An absolute treat.

    1. ‘You’re going to have to find a way to not express every feeling that you have every moment that you have them’ is an accurate summation of my 20s. ↩︎
    2. Also, for years he was the official, non-Buble soundtrack to Christmas in our house with Harry for the Holidays. ↩︎
    3. You have to remember, kids, this was a couple of years before the iPad launched. Every member of the band had a screen in front of them, Connick had one discreetly on top of the piano, and there was a guy at stage left running everyone’s scores – but crucially, the system was programmed in such a way that each instrument’s score ran simultaneously across each piece of music. And it’s jazz, so they were clearly only paying mild attention to them. Screen-operating tech, you were the true star of the night and I doff my black A/V hat to you, sir. ↩︎
    4. Let’s take a minute for Trombone Shorty. This guy was performing on public stages before he was in high school. We saw him first on the Hurricane Katrina-themed Christmas episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. For the couple of years I spent in vans and cars driving to far off work gigs, the whole Backatown album was a mainstay on for months. Hurricane Season is the track to get started with, but also his Tiny Desk Concert is a delight. ↩︎