The New York State Sheep & Wool Festival

For the past few years Deb’s gone to the New York State Sheep & Wool Festival, held every October in Rhinebeck. I usually stay home and go feral — listen to jazz real loud, practice longer, eat stuff that Deb wisely shuns.

This year, however, Rhinebeck (which is what she and apparently all attendees — yarn junkies, wool geeks, sheep enthusiasts, spinners, knitting blog superstars, fiber freaks, Uma Thurman [Deb INSISTS she spotted her there...] and docile spouses who obediently look away every time the credit card is pulled out — call this event) hit the calendar exactly one week after I’d finished recording an upcoming CD.

I thought it might be fun to join Deb and chill out on a road trip after all that intensity, and therefore found myself on the I-90, driving across lovely New York state more or less along the path of the old Erie Canal, taking in the amazing fall colors and the occasional pounding rain, on the way to the Hudson River valley.

Apparently one requirement of making this pilgrimage is that you must sport a “Rhinebeck sweater,” made specifically to show off at the big event. Deb wore hers as a sort of penance: she said it was the sorry outcome of “drunk ordering” skeins of yarn that looked lovely on a web site, but that revealed themselves, once actual knitting took place, to have a color scheme Deb labeled “Clown Barf.” So she wore her Clown Barf Sweater to Rhinebeck as a hairshirt to atone for her sin of ordering the stuff in the first place. (One elegantly-sweatered woman came up to Deb and complemented her on the Clown Barf Sweater, but we’re pretty sure that woman had lost a bet...)

My Rhinebeck sweater, based on a pattern Deb found on the online knitters’ cult/discussion group Ravelry, turned out quite nice, thank you!

Deb made a Rhinebeck shawl for Murley, our trusty sidekick, bon vivant, life coach, and navigator.

Buffalo Alphabet

Hmmm. I see it's been a year since I've posted here. I'm spending most of my blogging energies on my jazz blog, Harder Bop, but: to celebrate this blog, which merits more attention, here's something that I think is cool: Buffalo Alphabet. (Click on the image to see it at a larger size...)

La Terrasse

Back on our first tour in May, the quintet had our debut lunch together at La Terrasse, in the village of Grezels, a bend of the Lot away from Puy l'Évèque. It was a wonderful and leisurely meal spanning hours, putting us all on notice that this was not going to be a typical jazz gig.

The husband and wife owners of La Terrasse are also its only employees. You don't order off a menu. Instead, you eat whatever is on for the day: every diner will enjoy the same fare, the same courses, delivered to the table on platters "family style," as we say around here.

For our February return to the Quercy, Gretchen brought us back to La Terrasse. This time we knew what to expect: as soon as the tureen of soup arrived at the table, several folks said in near unison "Oh yeah, remember this?!" And when the soup was nearly finished, a few around the table engaged in the medieval Quercy practice of le chabrol: splashing some wine into our bowls and slurping up every last drop of wine and soup...

As before, we left stuffed. I could have made my entire meal off of just the wonderfully varied cheese course and would've considered myself a lucky man -- but we also had the soup and duck and salad and dessert and lots of Cahors wine, of course.

As we were leaving, I thought to myself "I could REALLY get used to this. Especially if I could buy some looser pants..."


Tom, Fritz, & Gretchen


Grezels in winter

From Here You Can't See Paris

After our May tour last year, I picked up Michael S. Sanders' From Here You Can't See Paris: Seasons of a French Village and Its Restaurant, at Gretchen's enthusiastic recommendation.

Knowing nothing about the book, I expected something along the lines of a Quercy-centric version of Peter Mayle's Provence books: a diverting light read about the occasionally infuriating but always charming French, their glorious cuisine and their enviable lifestyle.

Sanders' book is nothing like A Year In Provence. Instead, it's a deep and beautifully written account of how a small French town is changing and adjusting, to the degree it can, to modern developments: its young people are abandoning village life and agricultural work, seeking careers in far-away cities instead, while occasionally clueless foreigners are moving in, attracted by a lifestyle their very presence is threatening.

These changes are recounted over the backdrop of one year at La Récréation, an important (and glorious!) restaurant in Les Arques. (I've written a bit about our lunch there, here and here.)

From Here You Can't See Paris covers the history of French village life, offers an unflinching look at how foie gras is made, describes the unexpectedly cutthroat world of the truffle auction, and the occasional tension between natives and ex-pats -- all while detailing the prosaic behind-the-scenes planning and preparation that lead to a magical meal at a French restaurant.

And, with all that, I've barely scratched the surface of what's in the book! I loved the book and enthusiastically recommend it to anyone with an interest in food, restaurants, or French culture...

The Blue Lake Jazz 5

When the Blue Lake Faculty Quintet played last May in Figeac, representatives from the Altitude Jazz Festival heard the group and invited us to perform in February 2010 in their home base of Briancon. We were to play the closing concert of the festival, wrapping up a two-week series of performances that included Jerry Bergonzi(!!), Kirk Lightsey, and Uri Caine.

Gretchen used the Altitude gig to anchor a weeklong blitzkrieg of a tour that would begin on familiar turf at the Hotel Henry in Puy l'Evèque and la Balène in Figeac, caravan 10 hours westward up into the French Alps for gigs in the Briancon area, then cross into Italy for a Valentine's Day performance at the beautiful Torino Jazz Club.

We were now touring under the streamlined moniker "Blue Lake Jazz 5" -- streamlined to fit our new promotional poster, above. I took the opportunity for the new poster to use a shot where Matt's head was attached to his actual body (for the summer concert at the camp, I'd grafted his head onto the previous bassist's body, below, for the program. Looked just fine, not creepy at all, unless you knew the hideous secret...), and to replace the dorky shots of me and Steve with less dorky shots.


(Left to right: Not Matt, Matt.)

I REALLY like the Eiffel Tower! (But there's no "deeper meaning" to my interest in it. So leave me alone.)

10:09PM

I didn't modify the colors in the above shot (or any of these shots, for that matter) -- this really is what it looked like on a late May Parisian evening that progressed *gorgeously* from pink to purple to deep blue...


9:51PM



9:55PM



10:04PM

12:23PM, Saturday, May 30, 2009. Rue Saint-Séverin.

Murley Gets Around

10:39AM, Saturday, May 30, 2009. Place des Vosges.

We heard them from a ways off, while on a lovely meander through some of Molière's old Parisian haunts. They were under an acoustically-friendly arch at the Place des Vosges: I was shocked to see it was only 2 people. They sounded great...

Le Marché Beauvau

As if the Marché d’Aligre weren’t enough, with its blocks of stalls, manned (occasionally womanned) by vendors shouting for your attention as you walk by, hoisting these amazing cherries that you’d be NUTS not to buy, or MY GOD, LOOK at these LEEKS -- as if all that abundance and cacophony were not quite enough, there’s the covered Marché Beauvau, one of the oldest surviving covered markets in Paris, right at the heart of it.

You couldn’t find it in the Marché d’Aligre?!? Really?

Okay, here you go:

(Odds & Ends, & Also Odds)

(I've just gotten back from a quick week in France and Italy with the Blue Lake quintet that toured in May. Before I blog about this latest adventure, I want to wrap up some odds and ends that I didn't quite get around to from the May trip...)

TRÈS CONFIDENTIEL

10:23PM, Friday, May 29, 2009. Palais-Royal.

Lucy Schwartz

Paul, Judson, & Lucy. July 4th, 2003.

I can’t continue this blog without mentioning that we lost our dear friend Lucy Schwartz on December 19th. While Lucy battled cancer off and on for years, she was always positive and seemingly fearless. Our hearts go out to her husband Paul and sons Andrew and Judson.

Le Marché d'Aligre

Our friends Paul and Lucy have an apartment in the 12th arrondissement on the rue de Charenton, not far from the Gare de Lyon. The 12th is a part of Paris I wasn't familiar with, a pie wedge in the southeast corner of the city that begins at the Opéra Bastille, cuts east through la Place de la Nation to the city's edge at the Boulevard Périphérique, then south through the Bois de Vincennes to the Seine, which forms its southern border.

While the 12th is not a "touristy" part of Paris -- I've seen it described elsewhere as "working class" and "residential," and that seems about right -- Deb and I fell in love with our little quartier, thanks to the Marché d'Aligre, a wonderful outdoor market anchored by one of the last covered markets in Paris, the Marché Beauvau.

On our first morning in Paris, while I navigated the complexities of our shower (whose confident Space Age appearance belied its nervous tendency to leak a small but significant stream of water out under the bathroom door in a furtive meander toward the apparently lower territory of the kitchen), Deb set out on a reconnaissance mission to locate pain au chocolat and a baguette.

She returned to the apartment, stepping over the wet bath towels on the floor, with a wide-eyed report of an amazing outdoor market that started just a block up the street. "They have ... everything. It's huge. Anything you want. You've got to see it."

Rather than try to describe the glories of the place, I'll let some photos tell the tale...

Nighthawks (in the afternoon...)

A little brasserie, L'Escale de Lyon, was just up the street from our apartment on the rue de Charenton. We'd go there from time to time to recharge on cafés noirs: the woman behind the counter (she seemed to always be there) would give us each a glass of cool water as the coffee brewed, while Algerian music played on the radio. Deb wondered what I was pointing the camera at -- I wanted to catch a bit of the vibe of the place, and the scene I was looking at struck me as a bit "Nighthawks-esque."

Les Plats de Paris

I've been slow to recount the second part of our trip, our time in Paris, because I didn't want to say goodbye to the Quercy. Leaving there meant (means) leaving my friends in the quintet, leaving Gretchen and Fritz and the nice folks they introduced me to, and leaving Puy l'Éveque and the Hotel Henry, which wasn't a fancy place at all but which charmed Deb and me anyway.

Improbably, we had such a wonderful time in the southwest that I was afraid Paris would be ... a letdown.

It wasn't.

One big change: the way we ate. I've already rhapsodized on the glorious plates set before me in some very select restaurants in the Lot Valley. While we dined out occasionally in Paris as well (at joints not remotely in the same league as the fine establishments Gretchen had lined up for the group), most of our meals there we made ourselves, in the tiny you've-got-to-be-kidding-me toy kitchen in our apartment on the rue de Charenton, in the 12th arrondissement.

The simpler homemade fare we had there was a bit of a relief after the rich, foie gras über alles cuisine of the first week: generally more vegetarian (okay, at least let's say "duck free," which was a start), simpler, but very fresh, thanks to the glorious Marché d'Aligre right up the street (more about that later...).

As a contrast to the food porn photos I showed earlier, I thought I'd show some typical meals in Paris. The photo leading off this post was the typical breakfast: coffee, OJ, a petit pain au chocolat and a baguette from the nearby and glorious Moisan organic bakery, perhaps some fruit, some cheese.

In fact, more often than not that was nearly the formula for our dinners as well...

Meanwhile, Deb...

Deb, later, at the Palais Royal, Paris.

My trip to France was divided into two very distinct weeks, and so far I've only covered the first: my time touring in the southwest, mainly around the Lot Valley, with the Blue Lake Faculty Quintet.

For most of that week, while I was gigging and eating, Deb pursued her own agenda: she first became interested in France and French culture in the 4th grade, when she was introduced to the Lascaux cave paintings, which were not far from where we were in southwest France. (When Deb studies a culture, she likes to start at the VERY beginning...) Since this region was "where it all began" for her -- and, for that matter, where all of French culture began -- she was excited at the prospect of exploring this corner of France, which she'd never visited before.

Though Deb missed out on the extraordinary dining experiences that Gretchen had arranged for the group, she collected her own memorable moments. Deb's a near-native French speaker -- in fact, most folks would call her a native speaker, and regularly in France she was asked where she was from (Belgium? Switzerland?), because they could detect some hard-to-place "you're not from around here" aspect to her accent, but took it for granted she was a native speaker -- but Deb, as a professional in the language field, is very picky about the term "native speaker," which she pretty much reserves exclusively for ... native speakers, born and raised in the language.

Because Deb is fluent in French, she had experiences and interactions with French folks that were not possible for us Persons of Lesser Fluency. For example, she was carjacked by a little old French lady at the Château de Bonaguil.

(It's her story, and she should probably get her own damn blog if it's to be told properly, but basically it amounts to this: Deb went to Bonaguil on her own, several days before I visited it with the members of the quintet. An old woman spotted Deb at the château, chatted with her briefly about the unreliable cellphone coverage in the area, and then mysteriously appeared next to her in the parking lot at the exact moment she was retrieving her rental car. "Do you have a car?," she asked, as Deb was opening the door to the quite obvious and tangible car that she did indeed have -- in other words, at the point where plausible deniability ceased to be plausible.

"Um, yes," Deb responded, "bien sûr."

"Then you could give me a ride to the train station at [Unintelligible Name of Town]."

Deb, very game, said "Okay. But you'll have to give me directions to that town -- I'm not from around here, and I don't know it."

"Fine," the woman said, opening the door and getting in.

As Deb pulled out of the parking lot, she asked "Which way?," and the woman replied, "I don't know. You'll have to ask. That's why God gave us mouths..."

And so it went: Deb used her God-given mouth to ask random French people on the narrow roads of southwest France how to get to Unintelligible Name of Town -- which by then Deb had actually deciphered the name of -- and she had a nice little adventure with a nice little old French lady.

Now, if the woman had approached *me* at the moment I was opening my car door -- well, first off, she wouldn't have approached me, because I'm a scary-looking guy, while Deb's a very-nice-looking woman -- and which, by the way, is really unfair, since I'm actually a very nice person, in my opinion much nicer than Deb -- but anyway, if the woman had approached me and said "Est-ce que vous avez une voiture?" at the moment I was opening my car door, I'd have assumed that my French was somehow failing me, that she couldn't be asking me such an obvious question. First I'd have panicked a bit, and then I'd have regained my composure and blurted out "Um, euh, pardon? Uh, uh, répétez? Si voo play...," at which point the woman would've muttered "Oh for chrissakes, never mind, con," and left.

Children: please take this lesson to heart. Study a language diligently, and if you're lucky you might grow up to be carjacked by a little old lady in the country of your target language.)

Our new home in Montcabrier...

We first spotted the church at Montcabrier on a hill high above us. What appeared at a distance to be a ruin, a lone triangular wall with holes where windows had been, was actually the very intact church's very intact bell tower.



Inside, it was cool and dark, but my camera cheerfully did whatever internal processing it does to make it seem as if the interior glowed with a miraculous inner light.



Gretchen, who knew that Deb had fallen in love with this part of France, called me over to take a picture of a little place for sale, right next to the church. She had me make sure to get the sign with the real estate agency's phone number into the shot, so we could call and find out the price. I dutifully framed the shot, and we called the number a week later while we were in Paris.

The perfect ending would be that we bought the house and lived in the southwest of France happily ever after, as I could easily imagine sipping Cahors wine while sitting in the little courtyard of our little place in Montcabrier, overlooking the church and the town square.

The less perfect ending would be that we didn't ... quite ... have the Euros necessary to buy the little house. And our time in the Lot region was nearly up.

Our consolation would be a week in Paris.

La Récréation & Les Arques

I've already mentioned my meal at La Récréation, a charming restaurant set in a former schoolhouse in the tiny hamlet of Les Arques, and probably my favorite among a group of very memorable meals. The food was marvelous, as would be expected, and we were outside on their patio on a lovely, flawless late May day in the south of France ... in other words: heaven.

The service was also noteworthy. From my seat at our round table I was perhaps the only person able to observe some of the behind-the-scenes choreography that brought the food to our group. Far from where we were seated I spotted a server with a tray of food for us, and he lingered a bit before approaching our table, which I thought a little odd, until I saw what he was up to: he was waiting for his colleague, who had his own tray for us.

Only when both were "in place" would the servers approach our group as a pair, striding briskly and taking opposite sides of the table, wordlessly (but with big smiles!) placing the appropriate dish in front of the appropriate person. They did this with absolutely no flourish at all, nearly invisibly, as if to call no attention to themselves but instead to encourage our focus on the plate and the drama to be found there....

After dinner, Les Arques was a sweet little place to take a walk. Back in the Thirties the Russian artist Ossip Zadkine bought a summer home there; today it's a museum devoted to his work. We couldn't get in (remind me why Mondays are the universal day off in the museum trade?) but we could admire some of his sculpture around the house and the church, along with the brightly-shuttered house itself and some of the nearby buildings....









Across the street from La Récréation, someone seemed to think the only way to compete with Zadkine was to paint their shutters a manically cheerful, nearly hallucinogenic blue, and I salute them!