New York Voices

Image: New York Voices

What a great evening!

Met some friends for dinner at the Green Room in the Cambridge Doubletree before crossing the lobby to Scullers jazz club to hear New York Voices.

For dinner I enjoyed a dish of garlic-rosemary roasted pork tenderloin, cooked to medium rare perfection. The generous portion of pork was served over sweet potato gratin and topped with a small mound of baby spinach. Circling the plate was a cranberry-apricot chutney providing just the right sweet-tart balance to the main dish, garnished with several salty "chips" of thinly sliced and fried sweet potato. A good-but-not-great Caesar salad would have been improved with a lighter hand on the dressing. The salmon dishes and steak salad entree ordered by my table mates looked good and I heard no complaints but that pork dish alone would be enough for me to make a return trip before the menu changes.

After dinner it was over to Scullers to hear New York Voices, a jazz quartet who would put you in mind of Manhattan Transfer but with its own distinctive sound. Check out the NYV web site and you'll hear some of their music. One of the folks I was with is a long time friend of NYV's Kim Nazarian and it happens that years ago I often heard NYV's Peter Eldridge at the piano when he was on stage with my friend Maria Perry.

NYV played to a sold-out club of folks who were there for the music: it make such a difference when the audience is attentive to the performance! I wish I had taken notes so I could list the evening's songs ranging from standards to new compositions, backed by piano, bass, drums and now and again a sax. On their website you can hear Love You Madly, Darn That Dream and Peter's own The World Keeps You Waiting. Two unaccompanied pieces without lyrics (Jobim's Meu Amigo - the other title slips my mind) showed off the group's musicality, leaving you in awe that four human beings can produce such a rich texture of sound and emotion with just the natural instruments God gave them!

And I got to talk just briefly with Peter after the show - what a great evening!

-ConcordPastor