 Return with us now to an earlier, seemingly more innocent time,
when the San Francisco Bay Area was awash with youthful energy
and promise, when the S.F. neighborhood known as SoMa was buzzing
to a new sound, and a generation found its voice. When nightclubs
such as the Paradise Lounge, the Up and Down Club, and Club Eleven
teemed with young, affluent and partially educated cognoscenti,
sprinkled with celebrities such as Christie Turlington, Rob Schneider
and Charles Barkley.
It is, of course, naive to imagine that we could see this earlier
era through rose-colored glasses, knowing too well how all this
energy and promise came to such disappointment and ruin. The money
ran out, the clubs folded, and the record companies moved on to
some bright new oasis of cool. Today SoMa is a desolate and bitter
landscape with too many places to park. Musicians who once played
piper at the gates of the dot com dawn now hold down lonely straight
jobs with no benefits.
The names of such endeavors such as Alphabet Soup, the Charlie
Hunter Trio and Jazz On the Line now belong to history, architects
of a musical gumbo as bold as the City's famous Nouvelle Cuisine.
Musicians fled from all parts of the country to be a part of this
vibrant and distinctive sound. Record contracts were being signed
as fast as they could be printed, and among the brightest jewels
in this crown was a little collaboration between friends, known
as James T. Kirk.
Oops, I mean T.J.
KIRK .
During their short lived life, T. J. Kirk,
nursing the engorged breast of Warner Bros. and in collaboration
with legendary producer Lee Townsend, made two highly regarded
CDs that today fetch a tidy sum on eBay. The second of these
two, 1995's "If
Four Was One", was nominated for a Grammy. In addition, recordings
of their incendiary live shows became widely circulated in collector's
circles and over the internet. This live performance CD from 1997
represents the band's attempt to get a piece of the action.
That attempt, although not unmotivated by
greed, is a belated acknowledgement on the part of the band as
to the actual worth of their whimsical endeavor. T.J. Kirk was
always a combustible mix of strong egos and musicians. Will Bernard
and Charlie Hunter, the oldest and youngest members in the group,
had both grown up in Berkeley and gone to the city's sole public
high school, with its justly celebrated music program. Scott
Amendola hailed from Tenafly, New Jersey, and brought to the
band discipline and professionalism. John Schott, who a staff
publicist at Warner Bros. once mystifyingly dubbed the "mad blues scientist" of
the group, was an amateur musicologist from Seattle who, amazingly,
had never played guitar until a week before the band's first
rehearsal. Or so went the rumours. From the beginning it was
often difficult to establish where the hype left off and the
myth began.
The T. J. Kirk experience brought together
the music of patriarchs "T"helonious
Monk, "J"ames Brown, and Rahsaan Roland "Kirk," spiced with
Little Richard, Prince, and Bob Wills, in a sensuous and heady brew of guitars,
grooves, and historical anxiety. With a dizzying predilection for cutting across
a wide range of stylistic genres and leavening the results with a healthy dose
of self-deprecating humor, T. J. Kirk put on a musical variety show that was
not to be missed. "It's like putting your head in a blender," commented
John Schott, unhelpfully.
For two nights in December 2003, in defiance of all the pessimism,
cruelty and solipsism we now take for granted, the four original
members of T. J. Kirk - Scott Amendola, Will Bernard, Charlie Hunter
and John Schott - came together to turn back the hands of time,
to challenge San Francisco to make good on its promises, and to
breath new life into the fetid corpse of their legendary collaboration.
The DVD of that show will no doubt be available for the holiday
season of 2009. In the meantime, here's this.
James T. Kirk.
I mean T. J. Kirk.
.
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