A fond remembrance from Stan

If you like your music enthusiastically performed and widely varied and haven’t stopped by Joe’s on the Boulevard on a Wednesday evening, then I suggest you do yourself a favor and toddle over there somewhere around nine. Go earlier, if you’re hungry. I had a very well-prepared salmon fillet a while back and was quite pleased. And filled. They do stack those french fries up. I got there last night at quarter-till or so, got a beer and had just settled out with Joe and Rosa Pérez when the music started. Big fan Gene Novogrodsky showed up a few minutes later and joined us. The crowd was thirty or forty and digging it.

It’s the Bluzanos (or had been; I didn’t inquire as to their current moniker): Tomás Ramírez on sax, Emilio Crixell on guitar, Charlie Harrison on bass, Robert Gracia on drums and Joe Nieto on keyboard. And lively stuff it is. Crixell is old school rocker and his tastes run wide. He’ll go from generic blues in A (very well done, with sax and guitar solos screaming into the night), to a hopped up version of Wilson Pickett’s “6-3-4-5-7-8-9″ to a blowout on the James “Sugar Boy” Crawford’s “Aiko, Aiko,” made a hit in 1965 by the Dixie Cups and reprised by the Grateful Dead and many others. Good stuff, all.

Ramirez brings a lot. A favorite every time he plays it is his own tune “Quintana,” I have a five minute clip of the tune. Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me that I had a movie function on my little Samsung camera till the musicians were halfway through, so I missed much of Ramirez’ soloing. Nonetheless, when I get it processed I’ll put it up, even though I want to go back with better equipment and do them justice. (I need a piece of software that converts video to a flash format so that it’s small enough to post–my problem, not yours.)

I’ll also put up the second half of Joey Tamayo’s “Tequache,” beginning to be a very popular tune around the Valley with several bands covering it now. Tamayo, who had fronted the group up to last spring, sat in with several original songs, including the very hot tunes “A Media Noche” and “Te Quiera.” I was quite pleased to see him step up. He’s an excellent singer and performer.

So, if you haven’t been there, it’s your loss. You can fix that next Wednesday, of course.