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Track
Listing:
- Soul Power
- Four In One
- Bemsha Swing
- Skippy
- Damn Right I'm Somebody
- Cross The Track / Thelonious
- Now Please Don't You Cry Beautiful Edith
- Epistrophy
- The Pay Back
- Teo
- Get On The Good Foot / Rock Hard In A Funky
Place
- Jackieing
- Meeting At Termini's Corner / I Got A Bag Of
My Own / Brilliant Corners
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T.J
Kirk is:
Will Bernard - Guitar
John Schott - Guitar
Charlie Hunter - 8-string guitar
Scott Amendola - Drums
Produced
by Scott Amendola with help from Lee Townsend.
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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 11 teemed with young, affluent and partially educated
cognoscenti, mingling with celebrities such as Christie Turlington, Rob
Scheinder 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 Noevelle 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 are widely circulated in collector's
circles and over the internet. (Early next year the band will attempt
to get a piece of the action, releasing on CD a show from 1996, one of
their last.)
The T. J.
Kirk sound brought together the music of patriarchs "T"helonious
Monk, "J"ames Brown, and Rahssan 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," comments John Schott, the mad blues scientist
of the group.
For
one or possibly two nights this winter, in defiance of all the pessimism
and cruelty we now take for granted, the four original members of T. J.
Kirk - Scott Amendola, Will Bernard, Charlie Hunter and John Schott -
will come together to turn back the hands of time, to challenge San Francisco
to live up to its promise, and to breath new life into the fetid corpse
of their legendary collaboration.
James T.
Kirk. I mean T. J. Kirk.
Ropeadope
Records (2003)
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