This performance — faster than usual, happily so — took place last night, Sunday, June 21, 2009, at The Ear Inn. Wedged into their usual corner were that night’s brilliant edition of The Ear Regulars: Jon-Erik Kellso, trumpet; Matt Munisteri, guitar; Harvey Tibbs, trombone; Dan Block, clarinet; Jon Burr, bass. The song — written by (among others) Jule Styne in 1927 — is usually taken at an easy lope, but the Regulars tore through it as a change of pace.
To look at this band, you’d think them entirely involved in giving and receiving pleasure: they listen in a kind of rapture to each other’s solos; they construct witty, pointed, empathic backgrounds and riffs. And the communion, creativity, and joy we sense are obviously coming from deep inside them, individually and collectively. But there’s a paradox at work in this performance: everyone on this bandstand had only learned that day of the death of trombonist Joel Helleny — someone they had all respected, played alongside, and known. One way to handle their grief might have been to refuse to play, to go off somewhere to grieve in solitude. But these artists chose to heal themselves by offering their energies as only they could. Their spirit and their choruses healed us.
I just received an email from a UK record company, Edition Records, which offered this inducement:
Perhaps this isn’t very different than sending money to a public radio station to support its programming and getting one’s name read aloud over the air, or writing a check to get a PBS totebag. In fact, it harks back to the old model of print publishing, where a privately-printed book could be sold only to a number of readers willing to subscribe and thus underwrite its costs. 
I post this to offer evidence about what we all know to be true — namely, that jazz groups and jazz record labels have a hard time of it and find it necessary to resort to ingenious measures. What’s next?