A rainy first week of spring here in the Bay Area.

The Club Fox jam in Redwood City continues to go strong. I’ve been there virtually every week since it reopened in November except for two Wednesdays when I was back in NY for the Christmas holiday.

Over the last month or so a new Sunday night jam has been taking place at the Pioneer Saloon in Woodside. It features Terry Hiatt, local guitar player extraordinaire and all-around nice guy. Lots of players and singers are showing up and playing for an enthusiastic crowd.

Also over the last month the live jazz at the Turtle Bay Seafood & Grill in Foster City has ceased. I’d been playing there on average of about once a month since last fall.  It’s too bad because it was helping me keep my jazz chops on the road to improvement; I’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.

Meanwhile, the SNUG band has landed a pair of gigs at Murf’s Broadway Cocktail Lounge in Redwood City, the first this Friday and the second fifteen days later. SNUG has not played a show since August.

On the listening front I have recently been listening to John Coltrane’s One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note 2-CD set. The title track, a 27-minute improvisation by Coltrane, is a mind-blowing tour de force. As Elvin Jones is quoted on the slipcase, “it seemed like he was sitting on a mountain of ideas, and they would flake off every three or four seconds.”

I am also looking forward to the first album by the Tedeschi/Trucks Band, especially after seeing their transcendent performance of one of its songs, “Midnight In Harlem,” on the Crossroads 2010 DVD. I also have tickets to see them perform at the Warfield in San Francisco in late May.