Coming up this weekend:

The Dave Parker Septet – 6/29, 7:30pm.
Jam Session – 6/30, 5:00pm.

Dave Parker brings his seven piece pile-driving chamber jazz band for a deep plunge into music by Mingus, Coltrane, Dolphy, Morgan, Coleman and Johann Sebastian Bach. Dave is a Medici when it comes to supporting the cats in his band. We would prefer socialism, but it’s not up to us. We do love the music and the musicians! Henry Hung on trumpet, Charles Hamilton on trombone, Hal Richards on tenor sax, Cory Wright on bari sax, Karl Evangelista on guitar, Valentino Peeps on drums… and Dave on bass, conceiving the approach, the band, the set list. The arrangements are arrived at in mutuality through the complicated process that jazz can be and the results are grand! Those of you who have been in the neighborhood more than twenty years may remember that before there was Le P’tit Laurent, there was the Red Rock Lounge (that was after Bill Terry’s Lottery Lodge…), and that Dave squeezed a quintet into that little spot on Friday nights plying the same waters as he does with his little big band. Years later, he continued to do the same on Bastille Day and your occasional New Years Eve, when it harbored the for-now-shuttered French place…

Sunday, Vince Lateano hosts a jam session at 5pm (Ben Stolorow on piano and the Peter Barshay on bass). If you want to hear that lovely trio without all the folks sitting in, you’ll need to plan to be here on the third Sunday of each month for their ongoing residency. The jam session always occupies that sweet spot between wonderful and vastly amusing. It needs your financial support if you can afford to be generous, as most of the seats are filled with players from whom no financial contribution is required, though we’re adamant about paying the trio. If you’ve been in the City thirty years (don’t call it Frisco!), you’ll remember Vince from Jazz at Pearl’s. Those with longer memories know he drove an iteration of the Woody Herman Herd from the drum chair for a stretch and was at the core of the Vince Guaraldi and Cal Tjader bands in the mid-1960s as well. Vince doesn’t deploy a lot of firepower to say his say. He left the Army for cooler climates. He’s a gem, and we’re awed that he’s part of our scene.