Since it was a general admission show, my plan was to get there well-before showtime, snag a seat in front, then zoom over to the Marina Safeway to pick up dinner. Unfortunately, work kept me busy at mom's, so that by the time I could get away it was well past the time for opening the Theatre doors. Luckily for me though, the soundcheck was running late down at the venue, so I arrived to find a somewhat disorganized jumble of several hundred people milling around in the Theatre lobby, waiting for the doors to be opened. 

After five or ten more minutes, we were finally allowed to go in, and taking advantage of the confusion, I managed to find myself a seat right in the middle of the second row next to my friend David Ray. By this point there was no time for dinner, so I had to settle for a homemade 'energy bar' from the vending table in the lobby. Good, but a little too chewy for my taste. Normally I'm not one of those Bob Newhart 39-chews-and-then-swallow types, but that bar was dense!

Even with the fancy new Olympus C990Z that we bought on our recent Japan trip, I'm still having trouble getting good performance photographs. The automatic routines tend to take long exposures, so that even when there seems to be lots of light, the photos come out blurry. The two shots of George Brooks up at the top were the sharpest of the 20-odd pictures I took during the first set, and even those two are marginal, at best.

The music, on the other hand, was sublime. Kai Eckhardt on bass and Mike Marshall on assorted stringed instruments (mandolin, guitar, mandocello...) acted as great foils to the syrup-sweet saxophone of George Brooks. Aside from one tune dedicated to his former teacher, Jaki Byard, George ignored the piano to alternate between soprano and tenor saxophones.

The Japanese Theatre masks hanging in the lobby were somewhat easier to photograph. They were huge, about three or four feet across, and halogen spotlights lit them dramatically. I'm sure someone with knowledge of Noh Theatre could tell me the names of the characters that the masks represent...anyone feeling helpful?

As you might expect, the second set was a little more out than the first, but as I'm no critic, you'll just have to take my word for it. Ted Silverman, who was sitting on the other side of David Ray, has a review (and more pictures) posted on the PauseRecord website. Ted was shooting with an Olympus digital camera too, a 2040 or 2100Z if I recall correctly. Philip Elwood of the SF Chronicle reviewed the show: Hussain-Brooks Quartet's Kaleidoscope of Sound. (If you're really interested in reviews, I found another one, albeit of the 3/11/01 gig, at Jambands).

On my way out after the show, I stopped to take some photos of the night scenery. Cowell Theatre is situated on a pier inside Fort Mason, so it's actually out over the water. When things are especially quiet (for example, during chamber music shows) you can even hear the water lapping agains the pilings. Unfortunately, the only photo that came out reasonably well was that showing the theatre entrance sign.

And what's that fuzzy brown blob in the last picture, you ask? Why that's the partial scalp I found lying on the floor of my BART car. Musta' been an injun attack or sumthin'. Better keep my eyes peeled... wouldn't want to lose those curly locks to a madman wielding hair clippers.