Behind the Music

Re: "The Evening" from A Man Alive

The synth you hear in the beginning of “The Evening” was built by my friend Jackie Jones. She called it “the robot" because she had fashioned it to look like one.

I met Jackie at the farmer’s market in San Francisco somewhere around 2009. She was 83. I first noticed her dancing cat. It was made of thin wood, with bouncing arms and legs on moving joints. The cat had on a tasseled skirt and shiny star sticker pasties. She’d attached strings to all the joints and controlled everything with a foot pedal.

From San Francisco Chronicle

Jackie played only jazz and standards from the 30’s and 40’s. She’d recorded her own backing tracks on cassettes, and then bowed a saw and played a home-made guitar over the recordings and danced the cat the whole time. I was so taken with her whole situation, I hovered around and waited til the end of her set. She was suspicious of me. I asked if I could help her load out her gear. She had a minivan with no passenger seats, it was all for her gear. She said, …