Your Place Lounge
Trip Start
Jun 15, 2007
1
19
25
Trip End
Sep 05, 2007
Detroit,
Michigan,
United States
Monday, July 30, 2007
Tino and Johnny are the leaders of the popular Detroit band called the Howlin' Diablos, but they've been backing me up for 25 years since I first assembled my own band at the end of 1982 and started setting my verses to music again after a 15-year layoff from composing poetry and performing it with musical accompaniment. Tino started out with the Brooklyn Blues Busters and played drums with Big Walter Horton & the Rhythm Rockers, Willie D. Warren and Juanita McCray. Now he produces tracks and albums with R.L. Burnside, Kenny Brown and Nathaniel Mayer.
Jeff Grand joined me in the mid-'80s and I play with him every chance I can get. He was featured on my blues album THE DELTA SOUND, the first volume (of four) of my elongated blues work in verse, FATTENING FROGS FOR SNAKES, and produced the second volume, COUNTRY BLUES, for No Cover Records. He's produced albums on Detroit bluesmen Uncle Jessie White and the Butler Twins as well as his own No Cover album, Therapy.
Phil Hale plays keyboards with the great Thornetta Davis Band, jazz with his brother, drummer Milton Hale, and any kind of music with notes in it. They call him Phil Harmonic, and he can make any musical situation sound good. He's especially valuable to my band in the low-budget situations where it's either saxophone or bass, and Phil can take care of the bass part with his keyboards and give us another melodic voice on top. Plus he's a beautiful cat and it's always fun to be around him.
The crowd is another matter, starting with Rick Pinkerton behind the bar and Johnny Gianoplos on the door. Rick was one of the owners of the late lamented Music Menu in Greektown, where the kind of music we play and listen to was featured nightly for about 10 years in the 1990s. He and drummer R.J. Spangler initiated the Sunday night series at YPL so the musicians would have a place to get together on Sunday nights and blow to their hearts' content. Rick is also part of a band called The Brakemen, and I did a number with him on their album Songs of The Brakemen.
Johnny G and I have been pals since the early '80s when I was managing bands and booking music clubs in Detroit and he was working at a big club on Gratiot called Traxx. I'd moved to the east side in 1979 when Frank and Peggy Bach and I bought a house at 224 Lakewood, where the Bachs still reside, and later stayed in several places off of East Warren near Outer Drive, near the Red Carpet Lounge and B'Stilla Bistro. This was the G-Man's natural habitat, and we spent a lot of time together over there.
In recent years Gianoplos spent some time managing a beat-up joint at the corner of East Warren and Bedford called Barbie's Bedford. Now he's moved a little farther east to Your Place Lounge, where he can be found at almost any time, and the fellas call him the King of East Warren. I love to see this incredible character with whom I've shared so many laughs over the years, and tonight will be a good one at the YPL.
On the gig the band is in exceptional form and our opening set felt like one of the best we've ever played. The rest of the evening stayed on a pretty high musical level, and we were graced with a visit by Thornetta Davis herself, who sat in for a couple of numbers of her own. Except for the miniscule compensation afforded by a 50-seat emporium like YPL, everything was as lovely as could be.
Monday night I went by the Jazz Loft on Monroe Street in the heart of Greektown for the Milton Hale jam session and sat in with Milton and Phil and the band for a number between spells of simply enjoying the straight-ahead, hard-cooking bebop being played by the cats on the stand. The Jazz Loft is an undeservedly obscure venue that still manages to draw a nice crowd of musicians, serious listeners, college students and young hipsters to Milton's sessions every Monday night. With its bar at the top of the stairs, a comfortable listening room with a spacious stage and attached open-air deck, this is Detroit at its best.
-Detroit
September 3, 2007
