A jazz night tonight sounds just about right, especially considering the dramatic weather we’ve had pouring down on our hat brims and pooling around our gumshoes recently. Let’s start with the double bill at the Basement, where from 6 to 8 p.m. you can listen to Gil Cline’s Midnight Jazz-Tet do it right. Afterward, sax player Russ Thallheimer will scoot over to trumpeter Nick Talvola’s quintet to set us up with the goods for the rest of the evening. Buy some bevvies and tip the staff.
If you want a smaller combo, stroll over to the Arcata Playhouse by 8 p.m. for the avant-stylings of a duo of Bay Area heavies, drummer Scott Amendola and saxophonist Phillip Greenlief, whose three decades of collaboration have yielded some very adventurous sonic travels, eclipsing the regular limitations of a beat and woodwind duo with remarkable ease. This one will cost you $20 — two bucks cheaper if you’re a Playhouse club member — but the price is worth seeing some returning champs.
This article appears in ‘Reclaiming Their Ancestral Lands’.