!TAYLOR HO! is my working title for an on-the-fly event I am adding to my and Earthwise’s busy fall schedule.

Taylor Ho Bynum is a jazz musician based in the East Coast who plays cornet –a small trumpet — and write and records and tours. But he is also, apparently enough, a bicycle enthusiast and a bit of a hard case, in the best couple senses of the word: he is touring the West Coast from Vancouver to Los Angeles to play jazz AND doing a century-ride-per-day that is 100 miles and eschewing the devil petroleum products. That is, a bike powered jazz tour. Craig Matsumoto the KZSU dj formerly known as Wedge, wrote about this and I, noting Palo Alto’s convenient situation — as Portola nearly 250 years ago — between his Sept. 19 SF gig and points south, asked our man !Ho! to route thru Lytton Plaza.

Free concert, at Lytton Plaza, Saturday, September 20, 1 p.m.

Taylor Ho Bynum, cornet, with special guest Ben Goldberg, clarinet.

This is also loosely part of something I call ICO-BOPA the International Congress of Buskers of Palo Alto. I have produced roughly six concerts at Lytton Plaza featuring nationally or internationally known recording and performing acts. These events also loosely promote “busking” the historical mode of operation of street musicians since the middle ages thru early Charlie Hunter years. In this case, I book an artist to perform at Lytton but we have an agreement that if the plaza is otherwise occupied, we will simply move the concert to the most logical nearby venue, as a street musician would, or , rather, as street musicians from time do.

The City meanwhile, offers, for a fee and if you have the stomach to sit thru their red tape, a permit which would enable user for exclusive use of Lytton Plaza. But in these cases, and is natural and organic and normal and Democratic –especially if, like Taylor Ho Bynum and Ben Goldberg, you can IMPROVISE, the permit process is superfluous.

There also a little something called The First Amendment which I literally carry in my back pocket which permits us to gather, speak and even, to a certain decibel limit, blow our horns, literal or figurative or both.

Walls may come down.

Goes well with slice of cheese, mushroom and pepper from very convenient regional vender. (If you want a beer, you can peer out from inside said joint, which might still prove interesting).

I am hoping that in addition to reach-out and out-reach to the jazz-bos, that bikers will dig this, reap !HO!’s righteous riffs. I ran this by, or on a roll, Adina Levin, of Menlo Park, a bike activist, who said, surprisingly she knew of Taylor Ho Bynum.

My fondest hope is that a critical mass (!) of bikers will show up and post concert Taylor will lead us (!) six miles down (south) Bryant Street, the Ellen Fletcher Bike Boulevard, before, it seems, heading west and over the ridge towards what I understand is miles to go before he sleeps, Henry Cowell Park in Big Basin. Miss Fletcher by the way was present in spirit Saturday in San Ramon at the retirement party of former Cubberley (formerly? Try FOREEVER!) hoops player and coach and legend Hans Delannoy, if you, and Taylor Ho, excuse the typical Plasticy digression. This be like a jazz solo, methinks.

I personally will be helping to sell cd versions of Taylor’s latest release. Or Ben’s. Or both.

Taylor has the official version of all this on his blog.

edit to add, minutes later: check back to see how I resolve my apparent mixed metaphor of Gabriel and Joshua / Jerico apropos of “the walls come down”. Also: Gideon, or Gideon v. Wainwright? Also, the 12 minute tape I loaded originally seems to have a weird link.