Just like everybody else, I have this love/hate relationship with my job. Yes, even though I do what I want by being self-employed, I still have to do things I don’t like so much. And then, of course, there are the perks…
This month, the What’s up in Kyoto highlight is the Live Spot Rag, a small club at Kiyamachi with live music almost daily. There seems to be a slant towards jazz, but I have seen other bands and soloists in their programme as well. Besides sponsoring two free tickets for a Jazz concert in the last week of February (you can still win them if you’re interested), the manager also invited me to a concert.
And she suggested the “4 Tenor Madness”, a jazz concert with 4 saxophone players, which I saw yesterday. This is only the second time I have been to such a small concert, where the musicians know half of the audience and you can chat with them afterwards. And I don’t know anything about jazz, and was never and still am not into going out on my own much because introvert and such.
But it was fun. The Rag is very small, and I guess if there are really all 100 seats taken, it’s getting very cozy. But the food is nice and the drinks too, and the place is non-smoking (at least during the performance), which is always a bonus. As I know nothing about jazz, I could only make out a handful of the tunes (“Cantaloupe” was the encore, for those of you in the know), so I can’t say how much of the concert was actually “real” songs and how much of it was improvised.
Besides 3 old hands, there was a young sax player as well, and although I have been told before that I’m tone-deaf, I noticed at times that she was less experienced than the guys.
But yes, I had fun. Unfortunately, there were not many people in the audience – not surprising for a rainy Wednesday night I suppose – so I didn’t chat to anyone. Well, maybe next time.