We attended our latest concert at the Kessler on Thursday night and the artist was The James Hunter Six – Hunter on vocals and guitar, along with double bass, drums, keyboards, tenor sax and baritone sax. James Hunter is an English R&B and soul singer who spent decades playing in small pubs and clubs around London before 
catching the ear of Van Morrison who appeared on his first album, “Believe What I Say”. Hunter toured with Van in the early 90s and sang backup on one of my favorite albums, “A Night in San Francisco”, in 1994. Hunter’s first album was released in the US in 2006 and he’s been touring regularly since. He’s one of those rare musicians who has success later in life – now 55.
I enjoyed the concert quite a bit – particularly the two saxophones playing the classic soul rhythms and some great tenor sax solos. We laughed whenever Hunter had something to say to the audience between songs – his strong London accent made him quite difficult to understand. Here are some short videos from the show:
Friday night brought some more crazy Texas weather, which is typical for 
this time of year. Around 6pm a strong hail storm erupted, managing to block one of the drains on the patio. I got the joyous task of going out in the storm to brush the water into the pool before it entered the house. Just when we thought the flood was over, it would start back up again. The good news is that Penelope was in the garage and no damage was sustained to our new roof (replaced after a hail storm right around this time last year that happened while we were attending a show at the Kessler). Here’s a video of the hail storm in progress:
After the storm, we settled in to warm up and watch a movie. Our choice was “Mr. Rogers and Me” – a documentary about the host of the beloved children’s TV program, “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood”.
This was a well done and insightful documentary. Mr. Rogers was an exceptionally kind and well educated man who strived to make every single interaction that he had with anyone a meaningful experience – his two goals in every encounter were to make the person feel relaxed and important.
I finished the book “Every Note Played” by Lisa Genova earlier this week and absolutely loved it. For the first time in a while I’m going to do a separate post on this novel as I have quite a bit to say on it. I came across a TED talk from Genova about “What you can do to prevent Alzheimer’s” that is worth a quick watch. The message I took away is that you have to build up a reserve of synapses by reading and engaging in mentally stimulating exercises so that if some stop to function correctly you still have backups.
I’ve started the new book from John Irving, “A Prayer for Owen Meany”, but am only 50 pages into the 700 page tome and so don’t have much to report yet. It is shaping up like a classic Irving novel so far and so I’m sure I’ll enjoy the remaining time reading.
I heard this track by Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson trio from the album “The President Plays” and was amazed at Young’s tone – quite different than some of his faster pieces.
And from a completely different genre, I heard this cover of Elton John’s “This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore” by Roseanne Cash and Emmylou Harris at Starbucks this morning while having our usual post workout coffee and a crossword session. I’ve always loved Roseanne Cash’s voice and songwriting and this is a nice country infused version of the John/Taupin song. This is from the album “Restoration” which features Nashville musicians covering Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s music. There’s another album with current pop stars doing covers but I don’t think I’ll enjoy that one as much.