Best Things To Do in NYC

Restaurant week began for me at The Ribbon on West 44th Street. One of two venues with the same name (the other is off Central Park on West 72nd Street), The Ribbon is a roomy, comfy spot ensconced in the middle of the theater district.

Ken Burns’s epic history of “Country Music” covered virtually every aspect of that great American musical form, except, now that I think of it, one very important point: that country & western, like rock and also jazz, Mr. Burn’s other well-explored musical passion, has been a musical form that originated and flourished in the USA - with some foreign roots to be sure - and was then famously re-gifted to the rest of the world.

Nektar, which celebrated its 50th anniversary a few months ago, is one of those not-so-little rock bands that could. Their music was, essentially, too involved, too complicated, too “progressive” for the band to have hit singles, and even their albums were not the kind of surface-y, hook-y pop that generated Billboard chart sales - most of their most memorable “songs,” if that’s the word for them, were 40 minutes long.

About three songs in to his opening (Monday) night set at The Iridium, Simon Phillips, in his first talking break to the audience, made the comment in his unquestionably British accent that his friends in the UK have forgotten that he is actually English while most Americans are well aware that he wasn’t exactly born in the Bronx.

Whenever I experience the music of Pharoah Sanders - and I’ve been going to see him at The Iridium for over 15 years at least - I’m always reminded that many of the preconceptions that we have regarding the evolution of jazz are completely wrong. I have it in my head that, in the modern era at least, that every new school of jazz was more abstract and less audience-friendly that that which preceded it.