The Haul At Amoeba Records

Fun photo at the end.

Greetings from Berkeley, CA, where Mark Morris’s Pepperland with score by Ethan Iverson is playing at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Earlier this week we played in Williamsburg, VA, and gave our first Berkeley show last night. Our second show’s tonight, and a Sunday matinee on Mother’s Day, before decamping for Las Vegas and Beverly Hills next week.

Two shows in, it’s going great— the score is singing out, the choreography is heartbreaking and hilarious, and the audience at Zellerbach seemed to be breathing in sympathy with us. I love Pepperland.

We took advantage of a day off to head into San Francisco, our trombonist Jacob Garchik’s hometown, with an after-lunch trip to Amoeba Records in Haight-Ashbury.

I love Amoeba because the store feels confident. Amoeba says: “Of course you’d want to buy LPs, CDs and maybe some DVDs! Why wouldn’t you? We love these things! Come on in and have some fun with us!” Whenever I visit, the place is busy, with lines at the checkout counter, the staff blasting something interesting (this time some vintage Buddy Guy that sounded absolutely amazing, made me want to become a blues guitarist). Music is being sold, yes, but it’s being honored.

Like everyone who came of age in the Nineties, I remember very well when record stores were busy, vital places, filled with people of all ages. NYC has a few spots, but nothing like Amoeba. I could have spent three hours and $1000; instead, I spent twenty minutes and $68 for some treasures:

Every record is made with love, I’m happy to give these a home: Blakey’s Mosaic is the Ron McMaster transfer, thought by many to be superior to the RVG editions; drummer EJ Strickland sounds incredible on Ravi Coltrane’s In Flux, very happy to have a physical copy of this; the Charlie Haden albums are classics, as is Jimmy Heath’s On The Trail (great Tootie here); good to have the Diz and Bird with drummer Joe Harris, a player I’d like to know more about; couldn’t pass up a Relative Pitch release of Matt Wilson with Mary Halvorson and Kirk Knuffke; and the Zappa bootleg was huge with my brother and I when we were 12 and 14 years old; we must have heard it every day for a few weeks, the first medley starting with a good Frank song (“You Didn’t Try To Call Me”) before veering into the “Russian Dance” from Stravinsky’s Petrushka, moving to a few choruses of“Bristol Stomp” by the Dovells and then the Supreme’s “Baby Love”, a dizzying mix of high and low that I’ve loved since adolescence, one that prepared me well for Ethan Iverson, Mark Morris, and Pepperland.

Left to right: Jacob Garchik and Rob Schwimmer.