Macy Blackman, piano and vocals.
Bing Nathan, bass.
Larry Vann, drums and vocals.

$20 cover charge / byob.
Students $10.
For a reservation, call the bookshop at 415-586-3733.

Tonight, piano professor Macy Blackman and the Groove Merchant, Larry Vann inject a goodly dose of vocals into two sets of Motown, R&B, soul and blues, with Bing Nathan holding down the bass line.

Born in 1948 about 30 miles downriver from Philadelphia, in Wilmington, Delaware, Macy’s grandfather started him on piano in 1951. Growing up, he spent his summers five hours south of Wilmington at the foot of the Chesapeake Bay in Newport News, Virginia, so he ingested both southern R&B and country music and the early rock & roll and R&B of Philly. The first thing he remembers trying to play was Philadelphia’s nascent rocker Bill Haley’s “Crazy Man Crazy.”

In 1959, Macy met other precocious Delaware pre-teens also starting to play rock and roll (basically folk music of its day). By the end of 1960 he had turned professional, and by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the age of about 13 and entering ninth grade, he was gigging two or three night a week. He played in the first racially integrated band in Delaware, the Teen Kings, and also in the second integrated band, Ron Smith and the Evergreens. And he was also lucky to play with the Orlons, a south Philly group with lots of great hit records that peaked in 1963 and continues to this day.

Macy moved to NYC in 1966, picked up the cornet to play with a classic rock group, and played solo piano nightly in Greenwich Village clubs for years. He formed a band, the Rockin ’Rebels, in 1982, with an all-star line-up, working 300+ gigs a year for the next 14 years.

Macy came out to UC Berkeley to teach musicology courses in 2000, and in 2003 formed the Mighty Fines, a quintet including Larry Vann and Bing Nathan that plays a whole lot of New Orleans R&B, an expertise that Macy acquired from an acquaintance with a native practitioner, Charles Hungry Williams, back in New York in the cold, hard winter of 1978.

And so it goes! He’s got the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu, and he’s keen to share it with you!