Okay, last time I said that there were two reasons we went to San Antonio in June, 2022. One was that we just like the city. The other...Amos Lee.
You have probably already heard of him, but, on the remote chance that you haven’t, he’s a musician. His website is here: https://www.amoslee.com/. And he’s got a Wikipedia entry here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Lee.
What’s his music like? Eclectic, I think, sums it up. It sort of combines Folk, Rock, Blues, and Other. This, of course, makes him one of Martha’s favorites. As I have written elsewhere, that combination pretty well sums up her musical tastes. Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Beatles (the soulful stuff), Janis Joplin, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Mark Knopfler, Lyle Lovett, K.D. Lang, James McMurtry, Alison Krauss (with Union Station and with Robert Plant)... and so on. That’s her speed.
About the Photo: This is Martha during our 2021 trip to to San Antonio. We were having lunch at The Esquire Tavern, one of our favorite restaurants in San Antonio. (It is right on River Walk.) The meal and drinks at that time were excellent. Unfortunately, they were less so during our 2022 trip, but that’s one of the little bitty bumps in the road that I will describe soon.
I like all these people and their music too, of course. But, well, I tend to also like other stuff at least as much. I love classical guitars and lutes and bears (oh my), and I rather enjoy music with a bit of synthesized sound in it--ranging all the way back to Wendy Carlos and her explorations of electronic Bach and Beethovan, then to Vangelis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vangelis, you know him for the soundtracks of “Chariots of Fire” and “Blade Runner”), and all the way forward to Daft Punk, Schiller, Klaus Schulze, and so on from there.
Martha regards all of this electronic stuff with the same love and affection that you might bring to a root canal. I’d say it gets on her nerves...but, I’ve never been one for understatement. Let’s just say that fairly early on in our relationship, I reconciled myself to using headphones. A lot.
However, this does give me a rather potent weapon on those rare occasions when we disagree. As in, “So, dear, you don’t want to go out for supper? That’s fine. Let’s just stay home and listen to the Tron soundtrack on the hifi. What’s that? You’re getting your coat? Oh, I’m *so* surprised. Chortle. Chortle. Chortle.”
Anyway, we discovered Amos Lee when he was on Transatlantic Sessions, which, if you’ve not seen, you ought to check out. It’s a music program produced for BBC Scotland et al which presents American and British performers of folk and other genres (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Sessions). It’s quite good, both for the music and, frankly, for the filmmaking, which is stunning.
Anyway, we hadn’t seen Sessions until, one evening, it was on PBS as part of a fundraiser. We stumbled on it by accident and were absolutely blown away. (My father was still alive at the time, and I can remember calling him up all in a panic and saying, “Turn on PBS! Turn on PBS! You’ve got to see this!”)
The final musician that evening was...tah-dah...Amos Lee. His performance was astonishing. You can see it on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/-_-sskQWfK4
After that, we were hooked. Martha started buying his CDs and downloading his albums from Amazon. And we tried to find out if he was performing anywhere near us.
And he did perform near us...several times...but always when we were somewhere else. He was on the East Coast when we were in New Mexico. He was in New Mexico when we were on South Padre Island. And on and on and on...
Then, a few months ago, Martha was on the web, and then she came rushing into me. “Amos Lee is going to be in San Antonio!” she said, triumphantly. I knew what was happening after that. “When is he there?” I asked.
“June ninth,” she replied. “He’s at something called the Tobin Center For The Performing Arts.”
“Right-o,” I said, and put it down in my calendar.
I know the inevitable when I see it.
More to come.
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Copyright©2022 Michael Jay Tucker
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