Giacomo Gates – Patriot’s Park, Tarrytown – August 26, 2011
This was the only JazzForum Arts presentation I made it to this year – shout out to Mark Morganelli, still producing excellent jazz entertainment in relaxed settings. Also my first visit to this venue. Gates is a classic be-bop singer with an extremely wry sense of humor, he’s got major chops. Instead of a music review (I usually skimp on these anyway), an interesting story. The bass player here was Bill Moring, and the portrait is from a previous gig (Ignacio Berroa group). There were some major problems with the original portrait, that is, it got kind of ripped when I was careless in removing an adjacent page from the sketchbook. Let’s just call that episode a bit of OCD and leave it at that. So I repair the portrait through a combination of tape and Photoshop sleight of eye, and it’s good to go. Moring had put an interesting annotation above his signature: “Thanks for listening”. After the Berroa gig, I had done an internet search to come up with an incorrect version of his last name, using the one instance that I had found, spelled “Morning”. Then I was listening more closely at the Gates gig, and heard his name pronounced twice without any “n” in the middle. The subsequent internet re-search yielded the correct version, so I’m putting it up here. Moring’s blurb seems like a premonitory admonition, with a rectifying payoff. Eventually I will correct the version in the Berroa post, just too lazy tonite.
Giacomo Gates
John Hart
Ron Vincent
Bill Moring