Jim Duffy: Blog

Save the date -- Thursday, Sept. 16, 9 p.m. The Jim Duffy Combo will return to our "home court," the Lakeside Lounge, 162 Ave. B in Manhattan, near East 10th Street.
We'll be playing our unique blend of sparkling instrumental pop tunes and bouncy themes. We always enjoy playing at the Lakeside -- and who are "we," you may ask?
* Jim Duffy -- keys
* Dennis Diken -- drums
* Paul Page -- bass
* Lance Doss -- guitars
We'll be playing original tunes, plus a surprise or two. The more we play, the more "in the pocket" we get, and the wilder and freer become the musical notes. There's so much going on, you'll forget that there's no singing!
"Moody and bouncy instrumental pop tunes" is my catch-all phrase for what we do, but there's so much more. So come down and join us at the fabulous Lakeside on Thursday, Sept. 16, 9 p.m. -- sweet live music, no cover charge, intimate setting, friendly bartenders, and when we're done playing, the most rocking jukebox in New York City.
But I have to warn you: [...]

(Pictured, Jamaica Pond)
(Editor's note: Here are some non-musical notes relating to events that took place in 1989 and 1990. My band, Rods and Cones, had recently disbanded, and I moved to the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, down the street from Jamaica Pond. In a slight panic, I realized that I didn't know how to do anything, so I quit playing music and enrolled in business school at Northeastern University. It was a strange period, and the transformation did not stick. This piece was published in 1994 in the New York Press.)
Frank vanished into thin air, or something like that. I don’t know what happened to Frank, and maybe no one knows, except Frank, but he can't say, or maybe he can, who knows. This is the end of Frank, if in fact it was the end.
He owned the house, or at least it was his name on the mortgage. He kept a bedroom for himself in the back. It was an old, wooded railroad house that had been built at least 150 years earlier and had been transported from a previous [...]

(Editor's note: These remarks are prompted by Jim Duffy's recent gigs with the Elliot Mouser Floating Blues Band. To read Part 1, click here.)
To clarify and advance some earlier comments, I have lately been learning and relearning a bunch of Grateful Dead tunes, and I'm revisiting my own opinion of that controversial band.
The Grateful Dead were a social phenomenon as much as they were anything else. Is it possible to consider them separate and apart from their audience and look at them just as a band alongside other bands? Is it possible to like some things they do without being an out-and-out Deadhead, and is it possible to not like some things they do without absolutely hating everything they do?
No other band, before or since, is so identified with its audience, because no audience has ever identified so strongly with a band. People who saw the Dead play 80 or 100 times refer to the band members by their first names, and that band is as near and dear to their hearts as their own [...]

A couple of weekends ago, I had fun playing with the Elliot Mouser Floating Blues Band at an outdoor party in Sheffield, Mass. It was a big spread, lots of land, the Berkshire Mountains in the background. We played a long daytime set of mostly Grateful Dead repertoire, because that's what the people wanted, and it's what the Mousers tend to do.
The Grateful Dead must be the most polarizing band in the history of rock and roll. On the one hand, you have the millions of people for whom music equals the Grateful Dead, and the Grateful Dead equals music, and if it isn't Dead-related they aren't interested. On the other hand, you have the people who, upon the very mention of that band's name, spit in the dirt. When the punk-rock revolution came through in 1977, the Grateful Dead were the first to be lined up against the wall.
Is it possible to like some Grateful Dead stuff without regarding them as a lifelong spiritual quest? Is it possible to criticize them without passionately hating them?
The [...]

 

This note comes to you too late to do anything about it, but it may work as a thank-you note or a review.
If you live in New York, you know this, but for the rest of you, I'll tell you that for the past two weeks, a profound musical and social experiment took place in the city. The British artist Luke Jerram acquired 60 donated pianos, and from Monday, June 21, until July 5, 2010, he arranged for them to be placed in public spaces around the five boroughs, to be made available to anyone to play. The project was called "Play Me I'm Yours," and the idea was as beautiful as it was simple.
So for the past two weeks, I, along with thousands of other New Yorkers, have been on an outdoor piano-playing expedition, and I have enjoyed listening as much as I have enjoyed playing.
Some of the best experiences come from watching and listening to people who can hardly play at all. In McCarren Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a spinet piano painted yellow, in a sort of taxicab theme, was parked [...]