Fingers DelRay + The Jazz Thieves + Comic Tales of Tragic Heartbreak @ The Way Station

8pm- Fingers DelRay
Genre: Blues, Boogie Woogie
For fans of: BB King, Mose Allison

Toby “Fingers” DelRey developed his hot stylings while a lad at the St. Ignatius Orphanage for Wayward Sinners. Sister Serenity, a crusty old nun with a musical bent, sensed the child’s prodigious talent and, taking him under her wing, tutelaged him with a combination of Jelly Roll Morton, Johann Sebastian Bach and a strict regimen of dowsing the keyboard of the rectory piano -- a 1911 Flambe-Carbone upright -- with a solution of molasses and 190 proof corn liquor, setting it ablaze with the cherry of her White Owl and forcing the young genius to extinguish the flames with his speedy scales.
As Finger’s remarked recently in a rare moment of verbal lucidity: “The blues is in my blood, the stride is in my soul and the fire is in my heart.”

“Thanks a lot for sending me your album. I’ve been playing it on my show...lot’s of good tracks!” - Norman Davis “Midnight Flyer” syndicated radio host (streamed from KYOU San Francisco, CA)
“One of the best piano players of the last ten years in the blues self release scene.......Fine style, great musical taste!” - Simone Bargelli (dj for “Rock n Blues Today”, Italy)

Soul Bag (France-Le Magazine Francais du blues et de la Soul #198, Avril-Mai-Juin 2010) Toby “Fingers” Del Rey **** 4 stars!( Excellent, un disque sans déchet. Ou presque...)

“Kind of avante-garde blues with a touch of Chico Marx!” - David Bennett Cohen, pianist with Country Joe and the Fish, Elvin Bishop, Hubert Sumlin and Jimmy Vivino

fingersdelrey.com
https://soundcloud.com/rgfh10/sex-thing
https://soundcloud.com/rgfh10/blueschoir-frontdoorwoman-3-31
https://soundcloud.com/rgfh10/money-therapy
http://www.youtube.com/user/FingersDelRey

9pm- The Jazz Thieves
Genre: Jazz/Rock
For fans of: Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, Sufjan Stevens, Bjork

The Jazz Thieves are a group of jazz musicians from Brooklyn, NY. Their music “steals” elements from other different styles of music and brings them to jazz. Like true thieves, they improvise while sticking to a plan, and rely on a “certain set of skills” to help them make music. The band features the dynamic vocalist Matt Robbins, in addition to Ayumi Ishito on sax, Garrett Manley on guitar, Carter Bales on drums, and John Gray, the leader of The Jazz Thieves, on bass.

www.jazzthieves.com
https://www.youtube.com/user/johngray17

10pm- Comic Tales of Tragic Heartbreak
“You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life.”

So said Sherwood Anderson in his great book, Winesburg, Ohio. Comic Tales of Tragic Heartbreak knows all about accidents. Of birth. Of place and strange times. Of music heard through screen windows in summer, of lonely faces in discos while blizzards raged outside in the Northern night.

What’s a young criminal to do? Read every book he can get his hands on, obsess over record club 45s, play the theme song to MASH over and over on a rented trumpet, lose a thousand fistfights till he finally wins one. Ride a stolen bike, a bus, a train, get out.

Years later, redemption at last. Robert Whaley is just about where he should be. Compared to everyone from David Byrne to Leonard Cohen, he’s been welcoming audiences into a private world of enchantment and debauchery, and oh the influences are clear: Anderson (words and emotions), Fossee (dance and controlled hysteria), poetry (Artaud and
O’Hara).

Whaley had a lot of practice riding the line between rock n’ roll, performance art, and stand up comedy as the front man for The Niagaras, a legendary force of Manhattan’s live music scene of 80s and 90s, when a wild front man could dance on bar tops and swing from the
rafters without getting banned, except for when he was:

“Lunacy? Spectacle? And music too??”- Rene Chun, New York Times

No wonder the attraction included a “celebrity” following – everyone from Ethan Hawke to Kevin Spacey to Gwyneth Paltrow to the good people in Anthrax.

As a songwriter, Whaley has covered a lot of ground and has shown range through a number of outlets. He cowrote and recorded the original score for the feature film, Joe the King, starring Val Kilmer, and has also written for the stage –his rock musical Wrong Way Up ran off-Broadway at NYC’s Zipper Theater. He is currently working with playwright Matthew Freeman on a musical adaptation of the great 1908 novel, Buried Alive – now titled Selling Sacred Objects.

Meat Market Lullaby, the second album from Comic Tales of Tragic Heartbreak, reflects an obsession with pre-1974 soul, filled with nuance and tender bitter sweetness. Jazz pianist Mara Rosenbloom sets the tone with her loose/attacking, touch on grand piano and Rhodes. Pete O’Connell lends a sophisticated sense of drive and counterpoint as both bassist and co-arranger. Whaley’s long-time collaborator, lead guitarist and singer, Tony Grimaldi, shines with masterful harmonies and chunky guitar lines. Chris Schultz, percussionist with Blue Man Group, shimmers, cascades and of course, rocks.

Recorded live in the studio with a minimum of overdubs, a maximum of misfit charm, and this: “Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.” (Sherwood Anderson, again.)

www.comictalesoftragicheartbreak.com