Woodstock Wiki
Register
Advertisement

After not going to a concert for a while and not acting on my Woodstock Quest for a while, I decided that I needed to get out and try to rectify the situation. I read the Village Voice to see what’s happening in New York each week. I saw that Paul Motian Trio 2000 +2 was playing the Village Vanguard, so I decided to go. I caught the late show (11 PM) on the Saturday, November 28th which occurred during the Thanksgiving weekend.

I drove into the City and found street parking (a bonus) and walked to the iconic jazz club, the Village Vanguard. I had never been there before and did not know what to expect. I got into the club and was seated near the front of the stage. I got up to go to the bathroom and passed what served as a dressing room. As the band had already put on one show, I figured that I would wait until after the show to obtain Mr. Motian’s autograph (a mistake, as I would later discover) which I was interested in obtaining because he was Arlo Guthrie's drummer at Woodstock.

The club is intimate and it was cool to be in such a legendary place (hundreds of albums had been recorded there since the club was founded in 1935) to see a 77 year old legend. Mr. Motian was accompanied by: Loren Stillman and Greg Osby on saxophone, Masabumi Kikuchi on piano, and Thomas Morgan on stand up bass. They played about an hour and at the end of the set, Paul Motian grabbed his coat from behind the drum riser on the stage and promptly left the club. Or you can say, like a true drummer - he beat it.

In other news, I did not want to repeat the problem I had with my poster spending two months in England while Keef Hartley signed it. Therefore, I looked for a second poster (plus, I figured that I would need it as I ran out of room on the first poster) on eBay and found one of the 10,000 of the initial pressing offered by the gallery (Art Rock) where I purchased my poster. What makes this poster special is that the first 10,000 have an embossed Art Rock logo and were signed by not only Richie Havens, Arnold Skolnick and Grace Slick; but also, Wavy Gravy, Country Joe McDonald, and Carlos Santana.

Advertisement