It’s been a week since the record release party for RA Washington and Jah Nada’s recent album, In Search of Our Father’s Gardens. I’m still buzzing. It was a great party with a good sized listening crowd. Cleveland’s lucky to have a spot like Crobar to host this kind of scene. The band was led by RA Washington (electronics/bass) and Jah Nada (bass) and featured Joe Tomino (drums), Neil Chastain (percussion), Jose Luna (tongue drum/saz), and myself on saxophones/electronics. Haven’t been able to play a night of open, creative music like that in a minute – still reeling.
To cap off two sets of improvised music from “Gardens,” Vernacular (Washington (electronics/trumpet), Lawrence Caswell (voice/bass), Chris Kulcsar (drums) took the stage for a reading of Sam Waymon’s “The Blood” from arthouse blaxploitation classic, Ganja and Hess (1973). I took five minutes of video of this hypnotic performance before joining them to close out the night.
Was a great crowd, fantastic DJs (DJ Hama and A-live), live video projections…damn I’m grateful to be a part of this scene.
AJ Kluth 