Flutterby™! : Open Mic

Ahhh, blessed freedom. Forest was otherwise occupied last night (and should be most of this week), so we got an evening to ourselves. We went down to Cafe Amsterdam for Simon Costa's open mic night. It was good to have a night out, and quintessential Fairfax: Opened with Jory doing funny, had everything from two young sisters (as in the eldest was 11) reaching pretty high and not quite nailing the notes or the rhythm, to Chris Brown who'd just flown in from playing a stadium show with a Skynyrd tribute band opening for Twisted Sister down in San Antonio ("I was riding in the truck with our gear over from the hotel and the producer guy says 'yeah, we sold thirty five thousand tickets'" and "stacks of Marshalls this high!") and was working on some of his own stuff. We left after Larkin Gayl's set; there'd been the usual background chatter going on but when she started singing, with a voice you could spread thinly on scones and an accompanist (Eliot somebody?) on a bowed saw, the whole place went dead silent, and as she finished we realized that no matter how good the rest of the show was we weren't going to hear anything better that evening.

So Larkin's got a show with a bunch of other women ("we're gonna femme the place out") next Thursday, the 22^nd, at Peri's in Fairfax. Based on what I heard last night I can recommend that. See some of you there?

And Jory was pimping his new studio (check out the article in Mix magazine), if you have such needs I've got it on good authority that he's found the perfect sound after many others have failed.