The Elephant Room on Halloween

Last weekend I was lucky to visit The Elephant Room in Austin. Double the fun was that it was Halloween night in downtown Austin. Triple the fun was that the band was awesome.

We started with a taxi ride from the Arboreteum area of Austin to downtown. We did this to avoid the traffic gridlock that was expected (and experienced in the past) for Halloween night in downtown Austin. This turned out to be a great idea. Getting there was no problem as we zipped into downtown 10-15 minutes after leaving the house.

After getting out of the car and while standing outside the club on the street corner waiting for a second taxi of friends to arrive, we saw quite a few interesting costumes and people walk by. Outside the door was a somewhat convincing small man with a moustache and a hat that turned out to be one of the waitresses in the club. The breasts should have been a dead giveaway, but somehow I overlooked that.

Inside the club was very comfortable, aided by the fact that all of Austin bars are non-smoking. How nice to go out to a great jazz club and not have to worry about the need to burn clothes the next day from the rank smell of stale tobacco. A few nights before I had wanted to go into the Balcony Club in Dallas after the Bruce Hornsby concert to hear a couple of tunes and have a drink, but we could not bring ourselves to walk into the joint due to the overwhelming stench of stale tobacco wisping out of the entry door. The Elephant Room was a pleasant surprise in that area.

The band instrumentation was guitar, trombone, organ/piano, bass and drums. All of the musicians were great, but the guitarist was especially exciting. He played a very John Scofield sound and style. The drummer was also outstanding and his stylings reminded me of Ed Soph. The trombonist alternated between bass and trombone and sounded great on both. The organist provided the soul vaccination for the band with the rich B3 sound coming out of the organ. They started with a couple of standards, then played mostly a jazz-rock and fusion style for the rest of the night.

Some dork (who seemed to be an owner or manager of the place) insisted on standing in front of the mike on some tunes and providing poetic or narrative during vamp periods of the tune being played. Happily we were spared from most of the content as the mike was mysteriously turned off whenever he started talking or, um, singing. Thank you Mr. Sound Man. Other than this disturbing side show, the band was exceptionally professional and fun to hear.

Afterward, we had trouble getting a taxi back to the house. The streets were gridlocked and tons of people were walking around all the streets in the Congress area as well as the 4th to 6th street areas. Finally we were able to hail a couple of cabs and start the journey home. Once we got out of the inner city, traffic returned to normal and we were home in not time.

Great fun!