The Short Way Home

A Contamination Observation, Milburn to Tarrytown and Beyond Reality Flow

There are weekends you plan, and there are weekends that become something else while you are existing within them.

This one began easily enough at my brother Charlie and Claire’s place: incredible Indian food, swimming in their beautiful pool, lounging, ping pong, lounging, conversation, lounging the sort of unhurried family time that makes a couple of days feel longer than they really are... thankfully longer. Nothing ambitious. Nothing that needed doing. No where we needed to be.

Friday night we breezed over the ten minutes to SOPAC for Sunny Jain.

The show had been moved from the main room into The Loft, maybe a hundred people or so, and I had mixed feelings about that. Sunny should be filling the bigger room. Promoted correctly, I think he would have. But selfishly, the smaller room was wonderful. It turned the concert into something almost conversationally intimate.

Red Baraat Chaal Baby

Charlie and Claire danced, although Claire was nursing a sore Achilles tendon. Remi danced. A lot of people danced. I danced. Bhangra moves you in a way that few other forms do. “Pinch and twist the lightbulb”. There was enough bhangra in the room that sitting still would have felt entirely irresponsible, like refusing the perfect gift.

Sunny’s Wild Wild East is a different animal from Red Baraat. The band is smaller and there is more space around the music and each musician, which gives Sunny room to talk—to explain where things came from, how pieces relate to his own history, his parents and family, and even the history carried in his name. The music becomes autobiography without turning into a lecture. Contextualized.

That makes sense when you know where some of this began.

Years before Red Baraat became the giant joyful brass-and-dhol machine people know now, Sunny assembled musicians for his own 2005 wedding baraat—the traditional groom’s procession. The response led to more wedding work, and eventually Red Baraat emerged as its own band in 2008, pushing Punjabi and bhangra rhythms into jazz, hip-hop, funk, rock and punk without politely asking any of those genres for permission. Sunny describes the larger project as one of joy and unity, and that is not difficult to recognize once a room starts moving.

Remi and Sunny Jain after his performance at SOPAC

Wild Wild East turns the lens inward. Sunny has described its central image as a reconsideration of the American cowboy: not the romantic figure riding west into supposedly empty territory, but the immigrant leaving one known world and building a life inside another. His phrase is that the immigrant is the modern cowboy or cowgirl. The music lets Indian-American identity, jazz, rock, brass-band sounds, Bollywood memories and all sorts of other material coexist instead of choosing a single box.

That context mattered in The Loft. You could hear the stories and then hear what they had done to the music.

Remi was very pleased to meet Sunny afterward.

So Friday had already worked.

Then Saturday afternoon we looked at the drive home.

Three hours.

Traffic stacked across the route back to Long Island.

There are few things less spiritually enriching than spending three hours staring at brake lights because geography insists that crossing Manhattan is technically the way home.

Tarrytown, however, was about an hour away.

And from Tarrytown, home would be roughly another hour.

This was clearly superior logistics.

We decided we would go have sushi, spend the evening there, let the traffic burn itself out and head home later.

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

This was not a particularly dangerous secret. Remi loves sushi and she loves Jazz Forum, so there was very little chance of a domestic incident.

We got to the club early and Darrian gave us a choice that only really exists in a room like Jazz Forum: did we want to sit practically in Warren Wolf’s lap, or take a low two-seater along the wall?

I have done the musician’s-lap seating before. Jorma from inches away a few times.

A couple of years ago Mark Morganelli seated me at Jazz Forum so close to Kyle Poole that I was essentially inside his drum kit. It was fantastic. Once was enough…. so, I sat that close to Tyshon Sorey the first time I experienced him as well. Good to do “once” at least two or three times.

However, it is also pleasant to interact with your wife occasionally during a performance while sipping cocktails.

So we chose the wall, as well as the burrata.

“Wall,” at Jazz Forum, turns out to mean close enough to watch Warren Wolf’s mallets land.

Warren Wolf was a lot of fun to watch and experience this past Saturday night at Jazz Forum in Tarrytown

What a vibe!

Wolf is one of those musicians whose résumé almost becomes absurd when written out. He is a vibraphonist, drummer and pianist, a longtime member of Christian McBride’s Inside Straight and of the SFJAZZ Collective, and has performed or recorded with musicians including Wynton Marsalis, Bobby Watson, Robert Glasper, Esperanza Spalding and others. Christian McBride has also appeared repeatedly on Wolf’s own records.

None of that really describes what happens when you are sitting several feet from a vibraphone. Mom took me to see Lionel Hampton’s big band every summer at Old Westbury Gardens as a kid…. this surely was not Lionel Hampton.

At only a few feet away, the instrument stops being an abstract shimmer in a mix. You both hear and see the attack. You witness the mallet choices. You watch the damping and phrasing happen physically. The asides of each musician, the glances, the following, the knowing, the collaboration. Notes bloom and disappear right in front of you. Close your eyes and you become the music. The technical mastery and the emotional result happen simultaneously. Communion. Bliss.

It was both intimate and easy without feeling precious.

Which, I suppose, described the whole weekend.

Family meals.

A pool.

Ping pong.

Charlie and Claire dancing.

Remi dancing.

Sunny explaining how family history, echoes, can end up inside rhythms.

Sushi because traffic seemed like a bad alternative.

Warren Wolf because I had clandestinely made other arrangements.

And then the drive home.

That was the only ugly piece. Just an hour. Tarrytown to Long Island late Saturday evening seemed to contain a remarkable concentration of people who had spent their evening drinking and then decided the appropriate next activity was operating a motor vehicle. There was some genuinely unpleasant road behavior.

Still, door to door, mission accomplished by about 10:30 Saturday night.

That felt luxurious. Left enough time to get a 12 of PBRs… without any driving afterwards.

The interesting contamination here is that nothing extraordinary required much struggle. One thing simply leaked seamlessly into another. Reality flow. Family became music. Traffic became sushi. Sushi became jazz. A disappointing change, we had front row in the big room, became a wonderfully intimate Sunny Jain performance. Avoiding a three-hour drive became Warren Wolf from ten feet away… and raw fish… and saki.

Contamination is exactly what you want without intentionally looking for it.

The original plan survives.

We adapt, we become agile, keeping it simple we live within each moment, we just come home “carrying” more experiences.