I am writing the artist manager Alex Kadvan to suggest that his client Sharon Jones (of The Dap Kings) appear or speak out on behalf of Sharon Jones of Arkansas who apparently is being swindled out of her lottery winnings by corrupt and greedy store owner, in cahoots with corrupt and greedy lawyers and one judge.
Meanwhile, here is the luckier Sharon singing a Guthrie cover, here in SF, at Amoeba. Thirteen thousand people have already commented on this at Yahoo news. A thousand people and one hot in house newsreader comment on Huffington Post, but how many have come up with this happy ending? (They can agree to split the money but give some to Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings for a big free concert, uniting the Battling Sharons on stage the way Bob Marley brought together the two warring rulers of Jamaica; I am digressing from digressing but somebody smarter than me, or Stew and Uri Caine together, should write about Jamaica in the 1970s but as a Shakespeare history knock-off, with music, Bob and bob-ish, and maybe Dap-ish; Marley as Othello, with Manley as Iago; or Marley as Hamlet; but I said history not tragedy).

I met Kadvan when Antibalas played Makor, circa 2001, and then again a year or so later at Yerba Buena in SF, outdoors. More of an inspiration than a peer; I just realized, however, thanks to the magic of the search-machers, that he is also an accomplished cellist –unless, of course, there are two Alex Kadvans which brings us full circle to the Sharon and the not-so-sharing keeping-up-with-the-dumpster-diving Joneses.

edit to add, a few minutes later: Mazel tov to Alex Kadvan and his business nuptials with the uber-agent David “Boche Billions” Viecelli, who is secretly Canadian. They formed in New York a management entity called Lever and Beam which does almost sound a like a Jewish law firm.  There is also a useful interview with Boche here. Boche wouldn’t remember me either, not likely, although Earthwise is probably in their database for one or two small shows, booked by Tom Windish, who spun off later. A few years ago in a Pollstar interview Boche said that after ten or twenty years as an agent he then only talked to about 20 buyers, big buyers, which probably got indie promoters 21 through 200 like me somewhat miffed. Pollstar could probably tabulate this exactly but Earthwise in its busiest years, doing like 30 shows, was never more than top 20 in Bay Area, but had a high concentration of inspired bookings and lucky finds — plus it payed everybody, including staff . But it is also true that well before Michael Johnson of Em Johnson Interest partnered with Yoshi’s in SF his staff polled apparently everybody in the Pollstar book including me I remember well, just to glean insight into the promoter world. When Steven Bernstein’s Diaspora Suite Band did its cd release at Bottom of the Hill in 2008, the Earthwise 10th anniversary show, Ramona Downey on my behalf extended an offer to Boche for Sharon Jones to play because they were routed through the area, but whatever cred or merit that may have had was too little or too late. Any how god bless all the Sharon Joneses out there…

I am inventing a new category for this column and ongoing called “filthy lucre”.

edit to add,  a few minutes after that: come to think of it, I mention Alex Kadvan earlier here, in reference to the tall Nigerian singer-songwriter-producer Ugonna Onyekwe; I say that Ugonna should try to meet Alex Kadvan. Who u gonna call? Lever and Beam!

edit to add, six hours later:

Legendary agent David “Boche Billions” Viecelli actually read this post and wrote back that I had misquoted him or misremembered his interview with Pollstar. Gilbert Lopez of the Fresno-based trade pub, and a former sax player with Let’s Go Bowling, was kind enough to find the actual interview, from the 1999 Agents Directory, so that I could fix what I got wrong. What Boche actually said was that, a propos of the format wherein many agencies divide the work territorially, he and notable indie exceptionals (like Little Big Man, which is now folded into Paradigm, and Legends of the 21st Century, which is now on the other hand fractured into two different Ground Control Tourings) work the entire waterfront, talk to the managers, the whole nine yards. What he actually said, and what stuck with me because I still felt it slightly exclusive — with me outside that circle — was:

I don’t think that the value of my relationships would increase if I were talking to 20 promoters instead of 70 promoters, so I don’t see the point of territories.

I guess it was like a cold December breeze off of Lake Michigan when I realized I was probably not even in the top 70, that I was more likely somewhere between promoter 71 and promoter 1 Billions. But of course to his credit, and even as his agency and stature grew, Boche did correspond with me a few years later briefly about Laura Veirs, who I had been tracking before she had agent or label (but she already had a relationship with an excellent producer, and had Bill Frisell on her demo); I revisited that exchange with the unsigned Laura Veirs here.

As I explained this to Gilbert Lopez of Pollstar, who delivered my info within 20 minutes, amazingly, he said he had heard of the Sharon Jones lottery fiasco, and chuckled at my suggestion that Arkansas could get a Dap-Kings show out of it; Richard Bach said that inside of every problem there is a  gift.