I was Cathy Hubbell West’s first customer Thursday at Monique’s Chocolates of Palo Alto. Due to my furious chatter, it took her 30 minutes to make me a cold hot chocolate drink. It took me less than a minute to drink the chocolate.

I had noticed, or been noticed, from San Jose Museum of Art that David Levinthal has a show there. The blast had a picture of 24 Willie Mays hauling in a little scrumptious bon-bon from Vic Wertz back in ’54, before my time. Levinthal, it seems, makes photographs of toys that have a peculiar life-like feature. I had to suss around to learn that where I had seen his previous work, glossing baseball and war, was at Stellar Somerset Gallery in Palo Alto, at 539 Bryant. (It was also Just Desserts for some years).

That plus the sign on the door drew me in: MID JUNE WE ARE LEAVING FOR FRANCE AFTER FIVE EXCELLENT YEARS. AU REVOIR MARK CATHY MONIQUE.

This being 11:15 on May 15, I figure that I have a month to send off Monique Chocolate properly. Whereas heretofore, which I have a hard time realizing is five years now, I had used Monique as a device to prove to myself that I had a quintessence of discipline. I walk by it every day and repress my urge to eat chocolate.

Now at 11:15 I am at Coupa, who, incidentally, or not, besides their coffee and famous deals written on backs of memos, second stage angel buy-ins and all that, for billion dollar apps and other disruptiveness, sell bon-bons and truffles, from Venezuela (or so they say; they say the Giants’ J.C. Gutierrez is also from Venezuela, and I believe them too  Puerto La Cruz). I am sitting at an outlier table, not drinking coffee or eating chocolate, although my card is out, on the table, in case the help wonder why I am here, besides the wifi (which, incidentally, works if you need to check your email from nearby Phyllis dress shop).

To blog, or post or write, and not eat or drink leaves more band-with to eavesdrop and maybe get in on one of those deals, finally.

Monique is the daughter of Mark and Cathy West. She is graduating high school, Paly I think, and off to university, which is another reason they are letting their lease lapse. I oddly was able to recall the names of Cathy’s siblings, Nancy Hubbell and John Hubbell. They were all tennis stars at Gunn it its athletic heyday, whereas I say I was #13, which was also #4 JV, although I only competed in three not four matches and therefore did not actually letter. (My undoing was riding shot-gun on Tim Harris’ visit to Corvallis admit weekend and not getting back in time Monday to attend class before the match — senioritis).

I enjoyed hearing Ms. West’s perspectives on the weirdness that has been going on among our youth and their schools in recent years. I am childless (or “child-free”?) but follow doings thru the papers or the occasional Gunn Alumni events; I certainly get a lot of mileage from my freakish recall of people slightly older and slightly (or dramatically) better than me at this or that.

I told Nancy Soferenko of Phyllis’ dress shop that one year Gunn boys tennis had seven players who went on to play college tennis and that a guy who went on to #11 in the world was only #4 on his high school team. Whereas the number #1 that year only reached about 50th in the world (Chip Hooper and Nick Saviano).

I had a similar riff that I never published about the guy who owns or manages Stanford Park Hotel, Greg Alden, once being a CCS doubles champion runner-up, for Menlo (1990) and that the guy who is the pro at Oak Creek Michael Jessup was a two-time singles champ for Saratoga High.

Nancy said that her neighbor is Mark Smith who I recall as a very strong top ten player for Gunn, a year ahead of me and, as of 2008 or so, had a software product that “flashed not streaked” or “don’t streak if you can flash” whose only taker, it would seem was Phil Winston.

Tim Wong, Amy French and I posed for a photo, not a selfie but taken by Tom DuBois on the strength of me meeting Wong perhaps for the first time and him telling me he is a Gunn 1983, (to my ’82 and Amy’s ’81). Amy reminded me that her husband is Gustavo Cortez and he won or was nominated for a grammy for Latin Jazz. (I said that I had him figured for The New Varsity Latin Jazz Orchestra of which I was the flounder). I was supposed to bump Consuelo Hernandez, CDBG Planner, formerly with Bell, CA to bump Amy about using that photo for whatever propagandistic uses Shannon Burkey and Claudia Keith might devise, regarding Our Palo Alto.

And back to Our Bryant Street Palo Alto, a sign maker is installing four signs for the various not-art-galleries and not Vian Hunter there, but he is not related to the no parking signs which come into effect, May 19. And Frank Klein of Palo Alto, who I met when I had three clients who used to play his blues club in SF, has sold his Bryant street corn beef smoker to someone doing business as GB Chefing. (a name which reminds me of the notice on the former Edge/Icon that announced the new establishment as a “Super Club”.)

I entered Phyllis’s store because I wanted to ask Phyllis herself what she knows or recalls of the jazz pianist Cedar Walton. I know Phyllis well enough to know that she had heard Charles Mingus live, and I had lent her my book of Al Young’s recollections of Mingus. I woke up pondering the minor squabble between Either Iverson of the Bad Plus (TPB) and William Yardley of the New York Times (NYT). EI in response to Yardley’s obit of the piano player says “when I think of Cedar Walton I think of Cedar Walton — I don’t think of Art Blakey”, which I translated as something like: Iverson is mad that the Times could not describe the man’s work in its own terms, or kinda like saying that Orlando Cepeda was notable for having played with Willie Mays and Willie McCovey. I was pretty struck almost dumbstruck reading his blog, Do The Math and especially his interview with Walton and all the details and nuances he could recall or claim to discover in the tones and the phrasings and the sounds: phantom solos you could hear only in headphones that proved that certain parts everyone else hears were surely overdubs, the names for combinations of sounds that know one else plays or played before you, et cetera. Iverson claims that Cedar Walton, who was 74 at the time, came to a club at which Iverson’s band had just finished, and drank with the younger generation of players until 5 in the morning then drove Ethan home. Ethan asked a cluster of bass players (a bass cluster — is there a name for that?) who wanted to accompany him on “Bolivia” a song Walton either wrote or was known for playing (with its creator, or Dave Williams or Billy Higgins — I’ve never heard of it as far as I know, an unknown unknown or maybe an unknown known). The bass players begged off and eventually departed (i.e., sometime between 1 a.m. when the music would have stopped, in New York, and 5 a.m. when EI got tired of discussing or playing or writing about jazz; i like the play between i.e. and Ei and am working on a name for that, fyi). So EI played it solo, as a tribute to Cedar (who’s name does not sound like radar). Then Walton “showed him some things”. Did I mention that I am probably blackballed from Do The Math — although I do carry a picture of a Fields Prize in my cellphone and in fact, if my stupid cell phone was not acting up, I might post it here, for yucks? I doubt I merit inclusion in Ethan Iverson’s ongoing making of jazz history or chronicaling it, but I am going to mention that i once drove to Berkeley, picked him up, brought him to Palo Alto, to a little art gallery at Hamilton and Alma, which is now a start-up maybe H-4 or something, but not Dragon Theatre, or Premier Property or Lolly Font’s — and I am also, for no real reason, thinking of Russ Gershon’s Either Orchestra — the guard at, not Hamilton and Alma but Lytton and Alma is from Ethiopia and I was trying to tell him about the Either Orchestra Ethiopia Project –then I drove Ethan Iverson back to Berkeley for his Cal Performances hit with Mark Morris. I am sure I talked his ears off and for all I know that was the start of Do The Math, he escaped from my blather by ruminating on more pressing jazz matters, or mentally transcribed some jazz solos — I was telling him about Don Herron’s tour of places featured in Dashiell Hammet’s stories — and for that reason, that I feel bad about bugging him, that I went to the ball game instead of writing Ethan or hitting him on Twitter about offering the Billy Hart combo (with drums, EI piano, Ben Street bass and Mark Turner fly reeds) a clinic or special appearance, like a nooner at Lytton Plaza, like Magnolia Sisters did, or a meeting with the Mayor, or something with Music For Minors in Los Altos or Redwood City like Danilo Perez once did, between their Santa Cruz and Oakland shows, instead of them being off or in Fresno. I also contemplated being their driver from Oakland Yoshis to the Blue Whale in LA, which I doubt I’ve heard of but am wondering about Frank Gehry’s new Jazz Bakery. Ethan Iverson was once a student at Stanford Jazz Camp before he was on the cover of Downbeat, which is sorta like Russell Wilson admitting to Peyton Manning that he looked familiar because he was at Manning’s camp. Although I think Ethan told me this before he told Jim Nadel. I asked: “does Jim Nadel know this?” and said “I don’t think so.” But when I mentioned this to Jim Nadel he pretended or at least told me he did already know this.

Sam Whiting wrote about art initiatives at Stanford, including the Dispatch show at Frost this weekend, the May 17 I think, and that it has a pretty serious group of student art installation, including a metal whale you can or cannot not walk thru, and students took a two quarter class to present work there ($25 for Students, $40 for townies — sounds a little high, for Dispatch, who also played in Dinkelspiel in about 1999, when Wes Radez was at SCON). Whiting did not fit into this article, or does not know, that Stanford, perhaps most amazingly, is building to display Nathan Oliveira’s large works, Windhover, named for Gerald Hopkins Manley poem. The Windhover Contemplative Center — and it is being built — and this is a total scoop, that i should sent to Leah Garchik, especially if she is back from vacation — the builder of the Windhover Building, SC Builders, Sam Abbey, attended with my Dartmouth classmate Greg Hulbert (big at a bigger builder) a concert by rock band Train at Cubberley Community Center that I or my Earthwise Productions produced. I remember asking him something vague yet ambitious about whether his firm could or would rebuild for Palo Alto Cubberley or Cubberley Theater and he said that sector — public facility? Is there a word for that? — was something they did not do, a pond in which they as a metaphorical phish did not swim. (I guess Stanford is private so that’s different). Speaking of Phish, it is news to me that John Paluska, the former Phish rock band manager, is retired from music but owns a small mexican restaurant in SF that has “god sound”. I recognized the name and then sussed to repair the synapse gaps. Don’t know him but knew slightly Jason Colton who also was a Stanford SCON guy, around the era that Peter Drekmeier et al did Earth Day concert with Michelle Shocked and Peter Apfelbaum (who played with Don Cherry who played with Ornette Coleman, who Ethan Iverson, three-fourths or seven-eighths of the way thru his 2010 interview with asked Cedar Walton about), works with Red Light and Colin Meloy (who plays with former members of Calobo who also played the Cub, the Cubberley Auditorium i.e. temporary library, which has no AC and they played on a rare super-hot day, like we have yesterday and probably today — it is now 12:10 so I’ve been spitting riffs for about 40 minutes straight now.

And just as I am certainly the only person who saw Nathan Ford throw behind the runner for Paly and saw Mindy Kaling field a deus et machina screenplay as Matt Damon (score that 6-4-3- (infinity symbol)), I may be the only person who played “h-o-r-s-e” with Bill Yardley (circa 1981, he was 10 years old, at Stanford’s Escondido Village, while his mother Rosemary Yardley was a Knight Fellow, or what is Iverson’s term, “the patronage system”?) and gave Ethan Iverson a copy of the collected letters of Dashiell Hammett.

Actually I wanted to see if the potential routed date (if thats the word for that, it’s a word for something) for Billy Hart et al would fit with the note I got from Paula Kirkeby about bringing music to a local senior center — maybe they could break away either or ethan way.

Also, there’s a guy in San Jose Tom Berry who is a big Christopher Moore fan and either will review his new book here and or either or rebate me if I buy and read Moore for first time but don’t agree with his greatness.

“Play your shit” as Monk would say, according to Cedar, and Ethan. (I think Nat Hentoff says it more like: TK

edit to add, later that late late afternoon around midnight i mean 740:

i forget what i call that, but i like to play two videos here on wordpress format simultany-like, like with these two, both about 9 minutes, an album version of early TBP — the only album I really know,and thats a relative term in that I cannot name the tunes even — and some random bolivan

1. before I got on this chocolate kick, I was going to note Do The Math’s Palo Alto connection in Ethan’s noting the passings of Herb Wong (Palo Alto Records, PA Jazz Alliance) and Fred Ho (born here):

Herb Wong, whose Palo Alto and Blackhawk record labels turned out several important mainstream discs at a time when that music didn’t have many worthy venues in America. There’s a photo of Wong with Duke Ellington and some stories from musicians in Gabe Meline’s memorial essay.

Fred Ho, the legendary activist and baritone saxophonist. Kyle Gann has aninteresting take; Ben Ratliff’s obit is excellent.

2. John Hubbell, Monique’s uncle, actually won CCS doubles title in 1973 and helped the Titans regain the team title as well.

John Hubbell & John Horn, Gunn defeated Tim Harper & Tom Harper, Willow Glen 6-2, 6-0