The Short Way Home

Millburn to Tarrytown

Friday night belonged to Sunny Jain at SOPAC in Millburn. His Wild Wild East setup was smaller and more conversational than Red Baraat—the music opening outward into stories about immigration, family, identity, and the history carried in his own name. Charlie and Claire danced, Remi danced, the room filled with bhangra rhythm, and afterward Remi got to meet Sunny. The show had been moved into the smaller Loft, which may have said something unfortunate about ticket sales, but from our side of the stage it made the whole thing wonderfully intimate.

Saturday was supposed to end with the long drive back to Long Island. Instead, traffic said three hours home while Tarrytown said roughly one. So we changed the equation: sushi in Tarrytown, an evening there, and then home after the roads settled down.

What Remi did not know was that I already had Warren Wolf tickets at Jazz Forum.

That is not a particularly dangerous secret when your wife loves both sushi and the Jazz Forum.

Darrian offered us the traditional Jazz Forum choice between sitting practically in Warren’s lap or taking a low two-seater near the wall. I have done the musician’s-lap experience before. Once was enough. The “wall” still put us only a few feet from the vibraphone, close enough to watch the mallets land and hear the instrument bloom in the room.

Wolf has played extensively with Christian McBride, among many others, but résumés stop mattering when the musician is ten feet away. At that distance, the mechanics and the emotion happen together.

So the weekend moved almost accidentally from Sunny Jain in Millburn to Warren Wolf in Tarrytown—Indian food, family, swimming, ping pong, bhangra, sushi, jazz, and a route home that became better because we refused to take the obvious one.

Sometimes the detour is the contamination.