Up around 8. Left at 10, read Levine on hierarchy on train, met Jody Rosen for coffee around Bond and Lafayette. Then up to 42nd past 9th, to see a revival of Bock & Harnick’s The Apple Tree (1966) w/ Bree. Odd show, hard to believe it ran a year; female lead seemed extremely bland at first, but that was a trick. Had lunch at Chelsea Market, looked around Posner Books which has less poetry than when I was last there. Passed up a ‘lil Marxist tract called Can The Market Speak? and, in a record stall elsewhere, a 1980 version of “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” by a French band called Slow Twitch Fibres. This is in my wheelhouse, but $15? Here’s the track; the 45 is less on discogs. https://www.discogs.com/Slow-Twitch-Fibres-Face-The-Music/release/1904229. Bree went home, I called my dad while walking crosstown. Browsed outside the Strand but didn’t buy anything. Got closer to Community Church, found a (very messy) Starbucks, got back into Margo Jefferson. Oddest detail: she went to h.s. with Paul Butterfield (who was already playing South side blues). Went to AACM show: A cello solo and string quartet by George Lewis (who was there but didn’t play) – seemed a lot about texture, technique (mallets on the back of the cello) and attack: I don’t know how to talk about the harmonic idiom, but there were some cool sonorities. Then a more typical-for-the-series set by Steve and Iqua Colson – sextet, in toto, ft. Craig Harris. I’d say about an even balance of smoothly harmonized songs (w/ her on vocals/lyrics – her role in the group, though not her sound, seemed akin to Irene Aebi’s with Lacy), relatively ‘in’ solos, and collective improv. Perhaps a few too many reprises of the heads. One lyric stuck out: “Music keeps the world alive/Though musicians go underground.” Kept at Jefferson on the way back. Put on the Zorn/Lewis/Frisell trio – it’s pretty great; lights out 12:30.
No writing; no appointments or events tomorrow except writing, which is rare and salutary.