This post has been waiting a bit of time for me to have a chance to type it up and post it. I am really keeping very busy here with work. The hours are kind of long... I try to get to the school at about 9:15 and i don't leave the school until 7:30 pm. It does feel like all ryan and i have time to do during the week is work, though. By the time we get home and have supper and such, it's usually about 9 pm... leaves 2 hours to do things before i try to get to bed around 11ish. It really makes for a long day... but the kids are great and the money is good so i am not complaining.
About two weeks ago, Ryan and i saw a poster taped to the ground in front of the subway station. Really... the poster was just taped to the ground. I guess they are going for a place people would be guaranteed to look? They were posted all over the place. I took a quick picture of the website portion of the poster and decided to check it out. I was intrigued by the promise of jazz on the poster, and the picture of a sax player doin' his thing. It's no trombone, but a girl takes what she can get.
When checking the website, I discovered it was in Korean (duh!). Luckily, the Korean staff at the school are very kind and helpful, and one of them helped us out by calling the phone number listed, and getting general directions to the place we are going to. We discovered it was in the Nakseongdae neighborhood, which is only one subway stop off of ours! She typed up directions as she was talking, but they were all in hangul so i could not understand them. I had to run to teach class then, and by the time i went back to get those typed directions she was gone!!!
So, Ryan and i went for a nice supper at Subway (the Nakseongdae location is the only location we know of!) and then we decided to just start looking around. Half an hour later, we were still searching for this club. We saw posters everywhere, taunting us, and the posters even had a map, but we did not understand as all the landmarks were in hangul (hangul being the korean alphabet). After a while, exasperated, i am ashamed to admit that i ripped down one of their posters with a map on it (i figure it couldn't do them THAT much good 20 minutes before the show started). I then tried asking koreans as they passed where the heck we were on the map, as we had been walking for a bit. We discovered that the best time to get koreans to help you find something is while they are waiting at the light... look for someone youngish, dressed in buisness dress, waiting for a light so they aren't busy. They usually speak enough english to point you in the right direction for what you are looking for (the buisnessy young people speak the most english).
After discovering the 'ask while they wait for the light' tactic, we finally made it to the Mo' Better Blues Bar club, 5 minutes before the show was supposed to start! The club was small and smoky, but very cozy. The owner of the club was very friendly and spoke fair excellent english. He came over to have a quick chat and drink with us, as the set was starting. He seemed like a very friendly guy. The bar made EXCELLENT tequila with lime on the rocks too... using top quality tequila (NOT Jose Cuervo!) and even top quality lime mix.
Owen Hart Jr. was the feature musician of the quartet that night. Apparently, so the owner says, he is a very big jazz drummer in Europe. After seeing him play, i could easily see why. The rest of the quartet (a bassist, a pianist and a saxophonist) were quite good, but Owen's solos were nothing short of amazing. His solos were really quite inventive and he kept the tension tight all through his solo. I remember Dr. Lewis, an old jazz director of mine, used to say that any band can play loud. It takes a truly skilled band to play quietly. Owen mastered the art of dynamics within his solos, playing occasionally just above a whisper in his solos, with the audience so fascinated you could have heard a pin drop. Those are magical moments. Not only were Owen's solos awesome, but he truly mastered the art of leaving spaces and having quite sparse but meaningful spurts during the other's solos. In short, WOOO for Owen Hart Jr., and not only because he put me on the guest list after i messaged him about the show on myspace :).
All in all, it was really a fabulous night. Ryan seemed to quite enjoy himself as well, and was also quite impressed by Owen. I do plan on going back to that club for sure, especially after we discovered, on the way home, that it is only a 20 minute walk from our house (we didn't even need the subway!) However, i think this will have to wait until after we have been paid, as it came to quite an expensive night! We didn't get a receipt we understood and don't know whether it was Ryan's cover charge (which they put on the final tab) or my expensive tequilas that pushed it up, but for 2 drinks and 2 cokes came to 40$. If ryan had been drinking too, we really could have racked up quite the tab that night. However, it was worth it, as the atmosphere was great and the jazz was fabulous. I look forward to going back again :).
