Well, ok then. Lesson learned. My strength really does lie in acting naturally. Maybe I've actually been hiding myself in performances because of the uphill battle in clubs where I've had to 'go after 'em'. I'd really stopped having fun. Well, at Birdland for night 2, I came in stone cold sober and actually a little sleepy feeling from waking-sleep throughout the day. I must've blown off a lot of dendrites or whatever you call them to have needed so much quiet. (As I think of it, I don't think I've been sleeping very well at all since about two weeks before our record release concert in Chi.) So I didn't worry or think or even pray too much - and everything was, well, ok - certainly better than the night before - by 20 or 30x!

Full house again (thanks to bus loads of unimpressible French tourists with their cigarettes and ennui and gaggles of gray hair Playbill-holding Broadway heads). But, hell, full house and all the staff happy - delighted, in fact and treated us warmly and brotherly. Thanks to Richie, Christina, John, David, Brian & Jeff and all the waiters! Everybody happy & the music opened up.

Some good hang time too: Essiet told me a terrific story of his boyhood in Steven's Point, WI. One winter on the way to school he noticed a dog that had been hit by a car and thrown by the impact into the river at the side of the road. Well, it was winter and the river was so close to freezing that the dog's body got encased about a foot under the ice. You could see it - it looked like it was running on its side. No pain, no blood. Just a big reddish setter frozen in the ice. Every day he and his friends passed the place walking to school. They'd look for it to make sure it was still there. "There's that dog again!", excitedly, & start running to get away. They looked for it every day 'til spring came and the ice melted and one day the dog was washed away. "It was just gone," said Essiet. What a mysterious, significant thing to tell me. I wonder what it means.

Meanwhile it's on to DC by train. Next to me is gentle father and beautiful Buddha son spending time quietly digging each other (the wife two seats back with the other kid) - the boy curious, willful, though gently persuaded by giant, strong v-back dad to settle it down and relax into the trip. Dad's a good sort, a laborer, a worker in baseball cap and clean white pocket t-shirt and new jeans bought especially for the trip. He's the kind you see hundreds of every day. He probably make things go.

Also, here's LH with futuristic headphones like a kid brother with a new erector set radio crown pretending to dig Martian transmissions from beyond the pale. And out the windows all the time are sad toothless three-story brick industrial eastern towns all left behind by the energy of change - the broken glass and old bumpers, lamps, carriages in heaps beneath eyeless warehouse window frames. Can't even tell the town's apart 'cept for the occasional schoolyard signpost. This is the sad broken East.

Now at DC. when we lose the train I call to make sure the radio interview is still happening and to make sure it's quicker/easier to take a cab straight from the train rather than sharing one with LH to the hotel 1st, checking in, & then on to the hit. (It's not.)

So I drop LH with his gay John Wayne impressions at the Georgetown Arms - a joint all done up in that ubiquitous colonial Georgetownish style that makes you feel like you're in town to testify or be some senator's paramour du jour or act like you're in a spy movie. I strike out into the blistering hot DC pm for the NPR @ UDC.

There, thanks to low listener support and even lower gov't concern, only one CD player works (and it skips like a scratchy LP right in the middle of April in Paris) and the studio headphones look like somebody's dogs got a hold of them. The people are beautiful and trying hard to make things go but smart radio is pretty hard up in the US. We give it all we can.

Once we're done, rush back to hotel for one minute (no kiddin?) to dump my coat & grab the cash that's flying out the window from the summer heat-wind. After quick gyros while I walk I make it just on time for the rehearsal.

Now it's the dreadlocked loose-limbed Harold Summy on drums (Sonny Rollins for two years!) and the very swinging James King on bass sounds (from Stanley T's band - so you know HE knew Sugar) - both beautiful, giving cats and able to extend big swingam. King is a real Jazz-head - the kind you read about in stories, and who Hollywood loves to pretend to have always in the background of movies where the white character is hip enough to actually know some (briefly appearing) black characters by name. He's scratch, cool, twiny, a Jazz prince, a sound artist in swiveling, velvety ink. He's the kind who, if he's reading this right now, is saying to himself, cocking his head to one side, eyebrow down, "well, now, I don't know about all that "- him sounding strong and assured like lion-padded paws down a jungle dirt road. Beautiful.

Strong 2 hr rehearsal & sound check, then quickchange (5 mins only in hotel room to space out and begin warm_up), eat running again and then to gig. All smiles now as Ralph the Manager (who remembers us from last year) greets us all professional-like with a house full of 1/2 German doctors (out zu hear der Jazz) and 1/2 who-cares-as-long-as-they're-here types. The German contingent is a particular point of interest could mean trouble 'cause tourists can be THE WORST. Now there's only time to dive into it.

But grace does prevail and we pull off two of the tidiest experimental sets you could ask for (except for my scatting which always suffers on the road from lack of shedding time because of schedules like today's).

On the break one of the waiters, a young gentlemanly articulate brother nicely requests "Never Say Goodbye" from our first album (and for which I foolishly left the chart at home). I tell him that I'm in a different space now than when I wrote it - I'm hooked up happy married lover boy with perfect flower wifey at home waiting for me. But he's persistent, "That's sorta where I am right now, man. I really hear it, you know what I mean?" I'm sorry we couldn't play it, but we never got to it in rehearsal. I'll definitely catch my man on the b-side, though, if he shows.

At the end of the night and by the grace of God we collect more than half again the amt. of the guarantee in overages - enough to make even my mgr. in faraway LA happy. All I want now is a brain chill, but I start in instead to worry about my invited appearance with the Mingus Big Band in a few weeks. I need information & shedding time and LH is at the mind-control with car chases and guns and cartoons and it's 1.30 am and I'm dead on my dogs.

Digging on Mingus in the headphones at the National Gallery and fall into intake synchronicity when I come to Lyonel Feininger's painting, "Zirchow" (1918). Mingus and Feininger: two unlikely geniuses conversing in the unlimited universes of creative mind space!

Izzy's is a two story club; ground and underground. It's run by an excellent young French group who love the music and treat us in the hip and respectful style of their culture. It feels like the right shirt, which is fortunate 'cause it's also where we'll be playing six consecutive Wednesdays. At the Izzy Bar things finally relax and really settle down. We are joined and strengthened by Ugonna Okegwo and Yaron Israel - also by a packed, open-hearted house of neophyte Jazzers (and, I'm told, one return reviewer).

Such is the power of the good vibe in the room that I really relax into the groove and have fun on the set. Ugonna is clearly a kindred soul - a cat who is in it for the sake of the music. He's open-eyed and responsive to the slightest musical cues. He's also willing to stick his neck out once he realizes that LH and I really do want his input. It also doesn't hurt me that Yaron plays with a time feel I identify with right away - and in fact I find out later he comes from K-Town on Chicago's west side, where I served a two-year internship in grad school. Plus, he and I share the same teacher in Von Freeman, Chicago's great squealing rabbi, so you know we could get together there. Yaron and I fall into it right away. LH senses my relaxation and allows himself to shake off some of his own tension in the music's healing vibe.

Shame it was only one set? No way: we'll be there 5 more times and often with two sets. It's best to hit 'em hard and walk away the first time. You know, don't show 'em EVERYTHING you can do the first night, you dig? All beauty and respect to Yaron and Ugonna who picked up much sound in small time. Also to my man Pierre, who takes care of sound, and to Izzy herself who hosts us with excellent worldly moxie (and is, in fact, just the sort of raven-haired Frenchwoman men forsake homelands for). Post-hit relief and kicks, endless drinks and new friends.

Tough next day traveling. Up and still stumbly-drunk at 7.30 packing for car trip by 9am with LH to Boston on exceptional blossoming bloom-of-spring day with brand-new out-of-the-box blue sky above - us marveling at our continued blessings and gifts and having a good hand with silly goofing talk and deepest-bag Dexter G. all the way. Talking of plans for future creations and anticipations also. A good trip north in spite of queasy hangover.

But we're due in Boston @ 2.30 and by the grace of God that's just when we arrive, driving up the hotel path to find the club publicist waiting. There's not time for me to check in before my live radio spot with Fred B.

I'm glad to meet Fred. He's a lovable, funny guy - a bird watcher, jumping up at 4am in springtime. He's also a nutty, scatterbrained thinker like me - all glasses and elbows - who has to defend himself from technological attack in the studio every show. The first CD track Fred plays during our interview is accidentally from somebody else's record! No worries, though, just good vibe laughter and everybody pitch in on air 'till he's ready with the right disc. Later, I fall right in the same bag, though, forgetting the names of our soon-to-be musical sidekicks & muttering some foolishness to try to cover my own tracks, all the while hoping their wives aren't listening 'cause I'll catch hell if they are . . . (Later Fred asides to me that he does his radio show secretly, telling his day job hosts he's got a long lunch to take on personal business once a week. How can they not have found out, though?)

Rush back to the hotel after handshake farewell to lovable, mistake-making Fred. Next question: Is there a rehearsal @ 3? Have I missed it and has excellent LH taken care of everything while I've been gone? PLEASE say it's so. Exhausted while talking to Fred I was hoping for nap possibilities to arise and not just further tribulations upon my return: I still haven't even checked in! But alas - LH is asleep and rehearsal isn't until 6! How we'll get through two 75min sets on a 1&1/2 hour rehearsal I know: Hard-assed-up & running WORK. Except NOW it's 6.30 & no sound guy and no drummer. (There's always something!)