Cobb

Social Capital

 

 

I myself find cricket to be too damned dangerous, but I do love dressing in white. Here in Los Angeles it's about that time.

I'd only like to say that when I was a freshman in college, I was a transparently hard core preppie and for all the ridicule I suffered, I would have sacrificed a toe to be the dude on the cover of a Ralph Lauren catalog. I still have a pair of Rockports from back then and I cannot remember ever wearing them with socks. Now that I look at them, I see that I have finally wore a hole in the sole. Ah pity.

Clearly it has become no big deal for people like me to be our remarkable selves, and it's nice to have legions of homies just below us socially to affirm that our exceptionality is merely ordinary distinction, and not some freakish oddity.

Still, I prefer Eddie Bauer and Johnston & Murphy.

Why I Hate The Prius

"If you don't make electric cars that are better than gasoline cars, what's the point?"
-- Elon Musk 

The Prius is a remarkable success as a product vehicle for very cool technology. I was well aware of the risk that Toyota took when it decided to put its Hybrid Synergy techology together into a production car. And while other manufacturers took risks in other directions, notably Nissan decided to go big with its Titan and Armada trucks, the Prius has been the most popular and successful of all of the hybrid vehicles.

It has done so, I think, because of its styling and marketing as an anti-car. In other words, the Prius is a success precisely for those people who have no love for automobiles, but find them a mere device to get them from point A to point B. And as Hitchens often said of religion, once you buy into the truth of a fundamental lie (in this case that the best car is an anti-car) then every illogic follows. 

What I want to make fundamentally clear is that the Prius, like any car, is not the only way to package a technology. The Prius as an energy saving transportation device is better or worse by design. Not by category. I don't hate efficient automobiles, hybrids, pure electrics or fuel cell cars because they are environmentally friendly - even though I hate most environmentalists and their ridiculous demands upon the auto industry. No, I hate the Prius not for what it originally stood for, but for what it became and now what it is in the marketplace and what it stands for now. It is the anti-car.

Still, I have my prejudices, and it would be sufficient for me to hate the Prius for being the darling of the Greens. Interestingly enough, when the likes of that lamer Ed Begley Jr, had his airhead thralls climbing fences and picketing the termination of GM's EV-1, I didn't necessarily hate the EV-1. I didn't hate the EV-1 any more than I hate CNG powered city buses, of which LA has hundreds. The EV-1 was weird in the same way that Saturn was weird, admirably weird.

First of all, the Prius has a stupid name.

Secondly, it's ugly. It is ugly in the very same way that the Pontiac Aztec was ugly, and the Aztec was probably one of the all time ugliest vehicles. It is ugly like the Citroen BX and the Chevette Hatchback. It has this butt ugly, large butt with no hips. It's shaped like a bad wedge, not an aggressive sporty wedge like the Fiat X1/9 or a techy boxy wedge like the MR-2, but a weenie roundy wedge, blunt-nosed porpoisey wedge.

Thirdly, the interior tries too hard to be other-worldy. The ergonomics were specifically designed to take you out of your comfort zone and prove to you that you are in no ordinary automobile. Even Toyota had to acknowledge that they were doing it all wrong. The newer models are alien, but still spacey.

Obviously, the car doesn't perform. The market that emerged doesn't want performance from the Prius. The price/performance ratio was all skewed from the beginning. Well, at least in the market that Toyota has ended up cultivating through the cult of Prius. You see the expansion the great technology of the Hybrid Synergy drive that improved in about every way over the years was spread to other products in the Toyota and Lexus brands. Some offered high performance instead of mileage. Others put higher mileage in old familiar cars. But the price never made it worth it; in fact it had never been economical to purchase the Prius or other hybrids based on the improvement in gas mileage. There have been plenty of other cars that get the same mileage for 10 - 12 thousand dollars less - a difference that would never be made up by fuel economy. But that wasn't the point for Prius owners, it was to be seen as green, not economical that drove the purchases. So Toyota has had to eat its inventory of hybrid SUVs, Camrys and Lexuses. In the future, only the Prius will get the hybrid engine, and so it will be expanded to a number of vehicles, one of which might even be sporty.

Here in California, Priuses managed to get some semi-exclusive access to carpool lanes by being low emission vehicles, but they were not as low emission as a real car pool. Not much of a point against the car as against the shallow attraction to the vehicle as a planet saviour. 

Most people I talk about are aware of the green contradiction inherent in the manufacture of the advanced batteries that the Hybrid Synergy system requires. Again, not so much a knock on the car, but on the premises enabling its sale. It turns out that the battery pollution story was overblown but then again we've all seen Prius commercials in which flowers bloom as the Prius drives by. Which is a bigger lie? 

That doesn't much matter because I'm a car lover, and the Prius is an anti-car. The Tesla is the car for a man like me, and that's about all there to say about that. 

Drag Out the Dickens

This evening I watched Jean Reno in The Professional with my two daughters. It's movie night. I'm figuring out what I might do to deal with foul language. I'm unsure.

When he was about 12 I told my son that he shouldn't curse - not because cursing is bad, but because he doesn't have a real reason to curse. You shouldn't say that your life is fucked up unless your life is fucked up, and he doesn't know what fucked up is. And so while there is something to respect about Jay Z, I do puzzle about my daughters' choice in music. They do have the decency to listen to it out of my earshot, as do their addictions to the petty bullshit that runs through pop culture. I was listening to Fishbone's 1991 single "Bonin' in the Boneyard" and recall that their record corporation wouldn't even let them say 'funky ass bass'. Times have changed for the worse and people curse, but we really don't know what fucked up is.

His name was Charles John Huffam Dickens and he died during Reconstruction. I have yet to determine how much it might have been on his mind, and when time permits, I will. He was certainly one of the coldest eyes for detail in the detrius of civilization of the English speaking world; he could not have been immune to the charms of American slavery. That is, for what it's worth, our darkest chapter, and for all that - it's not so damned dark. The darkness of Russia's 20th century is so overwhelmingly ghastly that it's difficult for me to give us any credit for spine, though you must admire our nerve. 

So while I poke around for the equivalent of Conquest to plumb the depths of Chinese depravity, I do know what I want to get from Dickens - some flavor for the shit smell of London in the days when workhouses were the norm. I want to get the feel of what it's like a half to a full order of magnitude more socially polluted than what's going on here in the - Dont Tase Me Bro Generation. I know I ought to have a gun or two for my dumbbell strategy, but knowing when to shoot is more important than knowing how. 

You see, every day on Google Plus, middlebrow America is pissing and moaning and yes, cursing, about how depraved American society is. I ain't buying it. The ATM networks may charge you 3 damned dollars for an out of bank transaction, but they still count the money out right, and maybe we ought to pay that much for the convenience. In fact, maybe I'm going to join the ranks of those selling leeches for the boneheads seeking immortality. It only makes sense that for Charles Dickens, and Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Hopkins, and two dozen others - all of their works can be had for free or close to it. But if you want tickets to see Justin Beiber, well.. I'm not buying the expensive insanity or Linsanity of going Gaga over anything. That's for the young, bored and illiterate who, with any luck, will be out of a job and learn to live without all the disposable income competing in our economy for people with brains. What was it that Neal Stephenson said about the best minds of a generation writing spam filters?  Our society is not depraved, it's just lazy and uncomfortable. But that's an opinion as of yet uniformed by the details of the Dickensian.

Not for long. 

London, like the Holy Grail's Monty Pythonite who the Witch turned into a newt, got better. And all of the blather going on America's lightweight media, both old and self-righteously new, sounds to me like the illogic of the ensuing discussion about whether our society is actually a bitch of a witch. To much free fucking speech and no real thinking. 

How bad was London and how did it get better? I think maybe Dickens has the answer I'm looking for.

 

Key & Peele: Magic or Tragic?

The format is cool. The style is goofy. The subject is annoying. The context is comedy. The outlook is iffy.

So far, three episodes and it's about over. Key & Peele, the comedy duo who are spelunking their way through the top 100 stereotypes about contemporary male tragic mulattoes are about 75% of the way to the end of the tunnel, in the middle of the mountain of race. That's a tiresome mountain. They seem to have the comic spark to do a lot more, but I think they're milking it. In about two episodes, if they keep up this direction they're going to be squarely in Dat Phan territory. 

So far, their forte has been code switching jokes which they've managed to put into some fairly hilarious contexts - the evil voice of Obama's Anger, the restaurant complaint, and talking out loud at movies. Their take on the Nazi visitation for Inglorius Basterds was inspired. But it's still a code switching joke. That could work very well in a standup routine, but I need more than that from sketch comedy. So far, outside of the Obama references (their greatest joke of all was him pulling up to a street rap contest) K&P have done no current events topics, which their quirky sense should be able to pull off. 

Aside from the difficulty of Comedy Central's insistence on bleeping, which is fking annoying, K&P are not well served here. So we'll see shortly if they can step out of the bucket. The opportunity is stupendous, but they've got to get their characters more deeply situated outside of the jokes. Because, quite frankly, what is the last comic duo you've seen, the Smothers Brothers? Rowan & Martin? Cheech & Chong? It just hasn't been done in decades so the sky's the limit. That is, unless their whole concept of comedy is about breaking through one ceiling. 

Kirk Sorensen's Thorium Future

All I want is for Kirk Sorensen to have a long conversation with Elon Musk. But then again, I can't imagine how it couldn't have already happened - which is why Flibe must exist. I can't wait for the IPO.  

This is the future. I'm optimistic. This is the best energy talk since Koonin.

Brooks Nails It

Charles Murray? Is that what you've been talking about? Sheesh. Brooks has got the right perspective.

Liberal economists haven’t silenced conservatives, but they have completely eclipsed liberal sociologists and liberal psychologists. Even noneconomist commentators reduce the rich texture of how disadvantage is actually lived to a crude materialism that has little to do with reality.

I don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost, it still doesn’t make sense to drop out of high school. The influences that lead so many to do so are much deeper and more complicated than anything that can be grasped in an economic model or populist slogan.

This economic determinism would be bad enough if it was just making public debate dumber. But the amputation of sociologic, psychological and cognitive considerations makes good policy impossible.

The American social fabric is now so depleted that even if manufacturing jobs miraculously came back we still would not be producing enough stable, skilled workers to fill them. It’s not enough just to have economic growth policies. The country also needs to rebuild orderly communities.

This requires bourgeois paternalism: Building organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly rather than irresponsibly and, yes, sometimes using government to do so.

Social repair requires sociological thinking. The depressing lesson of the last few weeks is that the public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975.

Makes me very glad I'm raising my kids the way I have, in *this* community, where there is society. It's not just family values, but it's society - which is why I don't pay much attention to politics any longer. 

 

 

The Whitney Analogy

The saddest woman in the world is Cissy Houston. 

If you have to ask Wikipedia who Cissy is, then I forgive you. But really, that's all I really had to say to a small group of wonderful but unimportant people, whom I love dearly but hardly ever see any longer. They are my snobby black brothers and sisters who know who they are. There's an old cliche, borrowed of course but the bon mot nonetheless that you can always tell an Alpha man, but you cannot tell him much. I'm an Alpha, a member of the same fraternity as MLK, WEB and Eugene Kinckle Jones. If you have to look them up, I understand and forgive.

You see, I found something out about myself the past weekend, which was that I was expecting entirely too much of my people. And because they never satisfied my expectations, I dismissed their dreams. My people are certainly not a nation of millions, nor an ethnic minority within that nation. My people are a very certain selection of a very few who tend to know a lot about a few things and not much else. I can go to my cousin and she can tell me who Whitney used to hang out with, and we could also trade stories about Don Conrnelius as well. And although I hope he's not the third, I could tell you about some other famous black entertainer whose name is not important right now. What's important is that I'm the kind of guy who could hang out for a while with Greg Tate or with Elvis Mitchell because I have. And just last week I was hanging out with some folks who work on Wall Street but come from that same small exclusive village that I do. It was easy. I knew where to go, and I wanted to and I reconnected just like that. But most of the time I don't bother. 

I'm sad that Whitney died before her time, but in the way I'm connected to my little village, I knew it was coming. We all did, I mean, common sense and TMZ could tell you that. But she was trying to be more than she could be and succeeded. That makes you paranoid, especially when you realize how close you are to your little village. Hard to explain, that. But when all the people seem like little people, especially the ones you are supposed to love and respect - the ones you are supposed to keep in mutual check, power, wealth and fame are deadly. It's hard to resist doing the unthinkable when your success is singular. When everybody buys the package, you become immune to their thinking. And that is what has happened to my people. We got away with it. From Denzel on down. Well, I don't really mean Denzel, I mean Skip Gates. I mean the caretakers of The Positive Black Image.

You see, it happened. Everybody wanted it to happen. Everybody wanted Whitney to be what she wasn't - she wasn't Dionne Warwick. Whitney wasn't a complete pig; the lipstick worked. The Positive Black Image was credible, not just for Whitney but for a generation who saw Bill Cosby as Dad. It went from Sidney Poitier to Bill Cosby with Eddie Murphy in the middle. Eddie didn't have to care, and so he didn't try so much to keep up appearances - which was why his Dr Doolittle was so brilliant and good. But maintainers of the Positive Black Image needed Whitney, in the same desparate way they now need the Obamas even more.

But there's a loose and somewhat disaffected cadre out there in fine clothing and smooth diction who slip in and out of the dialect without straining. And I hope, as long as I've ignored them, that they are robust in their ability not to take themselves too seriously, but love what they have. Whenever I post a picture of my family here or on Facebook, I'm indulging that Old School select village privilege. I used to talk of aggregation and thought as most of us did, that we would all hang out by Nisky Lake in the ATL and swap Boule stories like some blackified Bohemian Club. Yes, my brother what are we taking over this year? It's happening, and it's not. 

My boy (well, he used to be my boy) was just at the White House the other day. I caught the photo on Flipbook. My other boy (well, one degree of separation) is running for DA of LA. We're not actually running things according to any plan, but we're running things. It's a fragile network. It's a good word. It can easily be broken, like speaking out of school - a school that almost exists. Yes I've always called it the Old School, and like balls, strikes, racism and gay marriage, it's all socially constructed. Real but not real. It's just a conventional understanding of things that you shouldn't really take too seriously, nor should you ignore it for too long. 

They said, back in 1968, that all I have to do is be black, pay taxes and die. But it turns out that two those things can actually be ignored, and Jesus has a promise about the third. The conventions we attach to them are ephemera, but we're always curious to know how are you going to live in spite of them? What's going to be your image, and how seriously are you going to play the role? As Cobb readers know, I tend to be about *do* rather than *be*, but in this matter the Stoic takes over. After all, with those inevitables you are going to do them one way or another. So attitude matters. How do you feel about all this? Are you going to be alright? 

The Old School. The maintainers of the Positive Black Image, the exclusive village of the Talented Tenth origins and keepers of all things dignified and uplifting suffered a catastrophic symbolic earthquake with the death of Whitney Houston. But we knew it was coming, and we know it will come again when the manipulations of our social capital are revealed again as they will be in the future. But it's OK, because we really never needed to change the whole world. We just aimed for it. We will be revealed to be frail, damaged and all of the glory about us that people wanted to believe beyond the limits of our gifts and ability to perform, well that glory will fade. And we'll all be a little bit more sad, and a little more real, and then we can finally be only but always what our true talents fated us to be. There will be only ordinary drama and normal tragedy, simple success and standard victories. That's what equality will feel like.

So I am recovering the ordinary dreams of ordinary successful black Americans with a cold eye but a warm heart. There's always something good to appreciate about talent, but we can all do without the symbolism. Whitney Houston is dead. Dead like Elvis.  May their estates continue to sell records, but not sociology. Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs. What's wrong with that?

Muted but Still Cobb

I've decided to leave the redacted banner. What is spontaneously happened is I have recognized that no matter what happens with SOPA or any other legislation, I'm not going to be the dumbass who will be restrained. I know enough schmoos to get hip to their lingo and find a way around. I know this because I just stumbled upon the fact that I still have pgp keys on the MIT server back from the 90s. I don't use them, but I have them. As I have other stuff that I don't use. The point is that I'm not the masses, and I know they're coming for me anyway. So to hell with participatory democracy and up with armor.

I figured at some point, probably 10,000 posts, that I would close down this shop, but it will probably happen sooner than that. Ten years prolly, which will happen in about 12 months. I've done all of the non-community bleating, the black conservative blathering, the christian apologia, the decent and humorous things I needed to do to consider myself the writer I wanted to be. And my writing muscles are good. And my coding muscles are weak. So for the next period, I'm going to amp up my coding muscles, but that's another tangent. As I began to suggest that I would begin studying psychology just because of Stephen Pinker, I realized that my writing has become an annoying habit. I never quite saw it that way, but in mastering my time in a new way, it is becoming evident.

This creates another problem, which is that now as I point my attention in the direction of tech, architecture and away from society, I'm going to alienate people whom I actually like. That is because, for a short period of sophomoric time, I'm going to remain pissed at the technological corner I've drawn myself into. It's like getting married and starting to see your homeboys from your wife's point of view. What was I thinking? 

But that's all part of change.

I'm going to try to find a new way to connect with the new audience I'll be cultivating as I transition. You see there are a lot of technical notes I've been taking that will get exposure, and there's the way I see the bigger picture that I must of necessity include in my technical writing journey. I don't know how that's going to work out, but I suspect like all of open source. You just put it out there and hope somebody can and will read your code. 

So I don't know what's next for over here. Something about Whitney I think.

Against Impoverished Imagination

If Only He Was Angry in 06

Our President seems to have noticed that other countries are not impressed with his diplomacy and they do what they like. And now he's angry about it. Awww.

The Obama administration is absolutely furious at Russia and China. The two UN Security Council permanent members' move on Saturday to veto a resolution on Syria utterly infuriated  US President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice. And they want us all to know just how piping mad they really are.

Rice called the vetoes "unforgivable," and said that "any further blood that flows will be on their hands." She said the US was "disgusted."

Clinton called the move by Moscow and Beijing a "travesty." She then said that the US will take action outside the UN, "with those allies and partners who support the Syrian people's right to have a better future."

Obama's people were all about being anti-Israel when this inevitability was becoming obvious several years ago. 

 

Related: Lebanon - Hezbollah - Syria

 

Jazz and the City

It has been a long time since I've heard any really good jazz and if I hadn't stopped spontaneously by Cleopatra's Needle in NYC this week, the time would have been longer. And you would have thought that wouldn't be the case considering the legends and veues I attended.

My first stop of the three was at the Village Vanguard to see Jeff Tain Watts. Tain has the problem all jazz drummers have, personality. Personality is supposed to be interspersed in the spaces between notes. But when it comes out ahead and behind accompanying musicians and tends to dominate, well that's not as musical as it should be. The evening was a lesson in virtuosity, of fast and furious energy - like when my son puts Guitar Hero on extreme and plays the fastest practice track. Sometimes it can be impressive, and that's what I witnessed. But it's a lot better if the music can be enjoyed.

I suppose I will always remember the evening by the expressions on Tain's droopy eyelids. Most of the time I watched the miraculous ability he has to drum up a perfect storm with an absolute Sphinx expression of emotionless dread. It was as if he had mastered the ability to resist the spirit within himself that moved his arms and legs around the kit. Percussion was happening around him, this Buddha, but he was somewhere else. Not tranquil but zombified sleep with eyes open. But then the magic would happen and in the moment of synchronicity Tain would come alive and do that thing, you know, that jazz musicians are supposed to do which is collaborate in the swinging mood. He would smile and then the cymbals would dance. 

The problem of course is that as soon as the horn guy got off the stage and it was time for improvisation, the bassist and the piano player dropped into the background functionally, struggling as they did with the printed music on pages in front of them. Hell is being Tain's piano player, and homeboy was in the seventh level. 

--

The Blue Note is another place, that for some reason I never got a chance to visit when I actually lived in NYC. But this time I had Rachelle Ferrell and chicken wings as she took the masses into the opiates of infinite possibilities.

I didn't know who she was. Now I know. She is the majestic aftermath of an emotional trainwreck, or perhaps shipwreck or better yet spacewreck. Imagine the matter-scatter of a collision between a gossamere solar powered butterfly-ship on kilometer long and a radioactive cobalt asteroid. What we watched was the slow motion spinning of the flinty splinters finding a new orbit and occasionally reflecting starlight. 

It's rather sad to see five men trying so hard to make waffles out of the spaghetti of Ferrell's soul. The woman refused to end the song as she squeezed every last possible intimate whisper on the final notes. After three painfully drawn out endings, the audience began clapping sooner, without waiting for the absent physical clues. After Tain, though, it was refreshing to groove in a familiar beat and have the comfort of listening to a song, rather than a physics experiment. 

Ferrell, whom I've never heard before - even her classics, has got the voice in the lower registers that I missed from NDegeOcello without the crimson political speech, but it too comes with its own gravity well of emotional baggage. It doesn't work. It's too late. Ferrell's mania would be appropriate for a wartime audience in a Blitz basement, but only serves as a soundtrack for the irony of smartphone protesters seeking healing. It was a night of moonbeams and invocations of spirits and unicorns for grownups. 

On my way out the door, I caught Ferrell and another woman in the sort of embrace usually reserved for funerals. It's too bad she didn't sing the actual blues. 

---

My cousin emoted the proper 'deep' and 'spiritual' refrain and the three of us (hmm now isn't that a mystery) headed uptown to Cleopatra's Needle which was convenient to my hotel. 

Now I know where jazz lives in New York. 

Perhaps it is because there is something ephemeral about the use of classical tools in the hands of youth, like inheriting at long last Dad's Mercedes that makes for the respect of the form. But a dozen anonymous young musicians just pwned all of the grizzled vet of the prior experiences with renditions of standards that just kick the self-serving sorrow of the elder two into the bottomless cistern. This Is Jazz! they proclaimed, and they made it so.

There were there were six at the level of outstanding. The first was the young lady in the green turtleneck who is on her way to reminding us what the vibraphone is all about. She plays it with a jazz piano sensibility that is uncanny and melodic. There is almost nothing to compare it to, what a fabulous invention.

The young singer has cloned off Ella Fitzgerald - and it is something she will hear the rest of her days so long as she only dresses like and is determined to have nothing else in common with Erika Badu but complexion. I sat there with my jaw dropped. The lady has power. I sat for 100 minutes with Farrell waiting for her to belt a note. I got two notes per hour. Here, it just kept coming, washing over us in velvet waves. You wish that there were somebody anywhere on the planet who could write her new lyrics. As well as she could scat, nothing could bring us closer to the truth of the torch than the ballads crying out to be carried on her voice. I must find and name this woman because we have not heard this voice in a generation. And my God she not only works the band but she works a pair of denim jeans like a super model. Everybody needs to know her before she becomes Irene Cara.

The piano player here with the bushy eyebrows and the dynamic shoulders remembers that jazz is a conversation best held by those who are not merely verbose but witty and wise. He has the of vocabulary and the humility not to make it about himself but man... smart fingers, smart fingers. He did what homebot at the Vanguard never once managed to pull off, switched up the tempo a measure and took us down a salsa path when the moment was spicy and off atonal when the groove required it, and yes echoed the melody. It's the interplay, that's what the swing is all about brother. Thank you. Thank you.

Sharp. Bright. And that incredible thing she does with her tongue. Take your mind to the kung fu ballistics of the first Kill Bill and the girl with the flying chain in the Tokyo nightclub and imagine all of the acrobatic martial art converted into a trumpet solo. The young lady who tore the house down wore red. Her energy is fierce dynamic precision. It is so distinct that it makes almost every other jazz soloist sound overblown and manic, sweaty and profane. Of all the performers passing through the jam session that Saturday morning, her style is the most complete. She is phenomenal.

And then there was the big bad wolf. At first I wasn't sure, but then I began to be convinced and then in a moment I knew it was true. The man on the sax was bored with the standard scale and did everything in the parallel off-kilter key AND improvized like Coltrane with chord changes in every arpeggio AND hit high registers with blinding speed and accuracy. The man was thinking so incredibly quickly that it was scary - when it worked. Lightning only has to strike once. Ouch.

The clarinet has been punked and we all know it. G Who Must Not Be Named now has a nemesis. Thank God for The Kid. He can bring the clarinet back to the front of a jazz band doing the straight ahead thing with the sort of omniverous competency of a true band leader. He plays all the angles swiftly, never much changing tempo though, and he too is thinking quickly. You could tell everybody's comfortable with him in the lead. Nicely done, son. 

There were more. The silky smooth trumpet girl in demin with the tone to match Clifford, the almost persnickety well groomed dude who reminded me of a younger me who had a bad night on his vintage trumpet, the dude on the 'bone who was doing something squeaky weird on the high notes and trying to make it into a style, the elbow flying drummer nicely banging, the competent bassist who did some mind-bending chord fingering, the redhead on the trumpet just slightly behind the beat who could do some really killer stuff when he gets his other training blended well into straight ahead. 

It was a remarkable night of music - one I will never forget. Much props to my cousin and R, for the suggestion to go uptown.