Music again, for the third summer here, to drink for a whole year like a camel. It began at the end of spring, first week of April, with the Dogwood Festival, where I caught some cool groves of Mother’s Finest. They rocked with some great guitar playing and the lead lady’s vocals. The limited crowd was jumping up and down. Also previously I got to hear Jodi Manross Band play. This girl could sing well, but she was sorta shy to be on the stage. So she sorta closed her eyes when she did her thing but I guess it was becoming because she was cute (I realize I am using a tweety superlative here) and sincere. From what I remember she was a school teacher as well to feed herself.

But since I usually don’t remember the music I hear at a concert, maybe a case of musical amnesia, all I can report is that I had a good time that weekend. Also the previous day I had the chance to do my first public reading of what others have called “poetry”. So that was nice.

Then lately I have become good friends with a lad, Patrick, for Ireland who plays the acoustic guitar and sings well like an Irishman. So while I may not understand everything he sings, I get by pretending. He gave us a few sing along sessions, one was at VILLA, where I hang out and play pool, and another at the Cave, with yours truly doing the cooking for the evening. We also had asked Hua, our violinist, violinmaker and photographer friend to bring his violin. So he and Patrick got to jam the Red River Valley, which was fun. This was three weeks ago.

And then this weekend, Tom’s church had gotten dem a portable organ from Netherlands and they were showing that off with a choral sing, to which being a shameless bathroom singer I am, I went and partook in the sang-ing. This was followed by some fest at VILLA, where a few brothers, who looked like distant cousins of Masai, got playing dem drums and got all booties shaking. Man, dem people really got rhythm. The best piece was of course, a drum jam, which apparently is how they “telephone” each other back in dem woods at Africa. We also had an acoustic band perform, I forget their name, who sang a lot of Tracy Chapman songs, apparently they were gonna play dem songs at the band leader’s daughter’s wedding. The Promise, a great song, is gonna be the processional, which I thought was cool. They also had a good cello bass section. And on the evening before, we went to Decatur Square to catch some blues from Delta Moon. The moon lead singer babe, always wore dark glasses and tried to act up like some wicked temptress out of New Orleans. She partially succeeded with her faux country “yall” voice.

Then coming up, we have the Atlanta Jazz Festival this weekend. On The Bricks, the annual summer pop/junk/popular music concert series begins the week after that. Hua also told me that his ensemble is goanna due some Brahms sometime in the first week of June, which should be fun. So that’s the summer music report, for now.