We are always on the lookout for a venue we can get to with decent music. Carol found The Nash (http://www.thenash.org/) an almost three year old venue on Roosevelt in downtown Phoenix. It is not very far from the Elks Lodge we are staying at in Scottsdale. We tried to get in Friday night but we were too late to get tickets online and 7:30 is real early for us to eat and get into town if we are not sure of getting in. We planned ahead, a bit for Saturday and got tickets for Chuck Johnson Quartet.
He performed two sets of straight ahead Jazz, mostly standards. The sidemen were also marvelous.
I couldn’t get a picture of the bass player and somehow I missed the pianist Al Daniels altogether although his playing was not to be missed. The venue is small, the sound is great and the seating is comfortable. Oh and the price is very nice too at $15/person. We got to talk with the performers during the break and after the performance and made friends with at least one audience member who was seated alone near us.
Dinner before hand at Corey’s just two doors down the street was very nice. There is a huge selection of draft beers and a decent selection of salads and sandwiches to satisfy veggie needs as well as meat eaters.
Although there was some nostalgia in the music, we doubled down today. We needed to get to a farm market to satisfy the need to replenish the greens supply and Carol found one that was highly rated (whatever that means) on the grounds of The Wigwam in Goodyear AZ. I suspect only one person (my sister Sandy) reading this will get the sense of nostalgia. Among our many family trips at winter break, one of the early ones, in 1971, was at the Wigwam. As we all remember it was chill and it
rained during our stay. We rode horses and the youngsters rode in a buckboard to the chuck wagon breakfast out in the desert and fighter planes from Luke AFB sought targets in the desert. Yechiel reminds me that he too remembers much of the trip although he was 5 at the time. One of his memories was the “treat” of arriving home at 4 AM due to a very delayed flight in Chicago. I remember returning to a house in the middle of remodeling and the builders arriving at 7 AM as usual. We never heard the power saw or hammers until almost 10 in the morning. But I have digressed.
Or have I? I suppose I ought to devote some writing to our travel history before we started traveling in an RV and before there was such a format as a blog. I will post those thoughts at Goldberg-online.net and mention them here as they happen.
