Description
The Velvet Lounge was a door that Fred Anderson opened continuously for decades, an access point through which the human soul could enter and explore the organization and chaos of the cosmos. Through this door the spirits outside also came into our little system. When the exchanges happened, it made a sound of joy, like el: those of us who weren’t there are lucky that recording devices were. It’s a generation removed and still we can feel their presence from the record.
Tatsu Aoki and Hamid Drake played frequently with Fred at the Velvet throughout the 90s, wearing smooth the handle of that door. One night in December of 1994, their guest navigator was trumpeter Toshinori Kondo. The quartet screams at the start, rests beneath a tum-tum tree, picks their way over rocky shoals and sandbars, freaks out. Like a mind, flowing through a door, to a shore, three long tracks.
Clarence Bright the bartender recorded the trip on a Tascam DAT recorder. Tatsu kept it two decades on a CD transfer. The CDr skipped badly and they had to use fancy software to extract the audio. Here it is. Trip way out with it.
