The Doorman’s Diary: 8.26-27.11

Jazz, as the impression many have, was played tonight. What do I mean? Disjointed melodies accented by a jagged sax. They sounded good, but it was more avant-garde than the club’s typical fare. The bandleader hadn’t played here for three years and most recently had been playing a cruise ship. He plays drums and rounding out the quartet… a tenor, standup bass, and electric jazz guitar. With a deep voice, like rusty gears grinding in a vat of molasses, he approached me before the show and gargled confidentially about a half-dozen names that he said are on the “guest list.” I told him there is no guest list. He said, “But Mikey the Melody-maker and Freddy Sawtooth Washington are like family and they’ll be asking why they got in free in the past, and not now.” I was getting perturbed and was on the verge of sarcastically telling him that his prison-yard-named friends will need more than permission from their parole officers to get in. Instead, I said, Sorry man, the door helps cover your well-deserved fee for this gig and since the 2008 global financial crisis we just haven’t had the scratch to float guests. He grumbled off to finish setting up his drum set. The club filled with a disjointed assortment—a small old man wearing a Chicago Cubs baseball cap was accompanied by a younger big-boned woman, a jazz-loving woman in a mid-calf-length dark trench coat and black beret (remember it’s an air-condition-required summer night), a dubious gender man-woman, and a pulchritudinously-perfect, dark-haired young woman in a form-flattering tiny black t-shirt dress (a lovely jazz angel?) were among the crowd. The band played late and among the late arrivals were a couple of brothers who had literally moved into a warehouse loft apartment located a couple of blocks away. They were hooting and hollering as a guest tenor joined the group and added another dimension. They were also busy shooting video with their phones and emailing them to their dad, “Who will absolutely love this place.”