Dinner and a Show

Yesterday we had an excuse for a celebration, so we took it.  We went to dinner at very nice Mexican Restaurant in Parole, Jalapenos, that has a good mix of Spanish and Mexican food.  It's an interesting menu; you can either pick a traditional dinner entree, or from a list of "Tapas y Antojitos", basically mid-sized appetizers.  We chose the latter, having guacamole and chips for one (of course), and three more whose names I won't try to reconstruct  (one was a squid dish, one a meat, and one a duck).  The squid and duck were excellent, the meat OK.  The guacamole was better than average, and Georgia learned a trick or two.

After dinner we had tickets to a David Bromberg show at the Ramshead Tavern in downtown Annapolis.  We had tickets courtesy of Joel and Janet who had purchased tickets months in advance and were unable to go.  When we were arrived we saw that there was a second band advertised as being with Bromberg, "Angel Band".  It turns out that "Angel Band" is headed up by Bromberg's wife Nancy Josephson, with two other women singers, a guitar/mandolin player, bass player, drummer, and a fiddler.  Even more, incestuously it turned out that the two bands share many players, and moved in and out of songs regularly.  Here's is a Youtube of "Angel Band" doing what was a pretty typical song from their set:



In the last couple of songs, David Bromberg joined the band.  For the second set, Dave Bromberg and his band came out, and low and behold, the same drummer and fiddler, and new bass players and guitar #2.  David's set was eclectic, as one would expect, ranging from straight blues, and rock to gospel.  At one point, the girls from "Angel Ban" quietly stepped into the back of the auditorium, and then sang in accompaniment with David.

David is an excellent guitarist, but not one of the greats (IMHO), which means he's still orders of magnitude better than me. Even he said "I take perverse pride in hiring guitarists who are better than I am." I guess I need to buy a new guitar...  But I digress.  He and his band seemed to have a lot of fun, which counts for a lot.  He gave the guitarist#2/mandolin player and the fiddle player lots of opportunities for solos, and they were excellent.

This is the last song of the night, the second encore.  The band seems to be the same people as last night.


I also recommend Delia:




I had never been to see him before, but it was a great evening, and I'll add him to the "watch for" list.