I’m editing Graphic Lessons for the umpteenth time and want my lead character, Detective Steve Kulchek, to love Latino music. So I went to St. Peter’s Church at 619 Lexington Ave. on Monday evening to hear, to see, to savor Gregorio Uribe Big Band: Nueva York. The idea is to highlight Latin-American New Yorkers. Maestro Uribe had a stellar list of guests: Paquito D’Rivera, Jorge Glem, JP Jofre, Magos Herrera and Solange Prat. The place rocked. The photos tell the story.
A friend and I celebrated his birthday at La Ripaille. For dining I appreciate old fashioned, formal French food and manners. La Ripaille is textbook perfect. Nothing like champagne, pate, and duck to make your conversation profound.
Highlights in Jazz at BMCC Tribeca repeatedly reminds you that it’s the longest running jazz concert series in NYC. Forty-seven years young!!!! Sweetened by supper at Gigino’s, a friend gently dragged me to a concert honoring Sidney Bechet. .Dr. (North Florida State honorary degree) Jack Kleinsinger went through his usual humble tooting of his own horn. Bechet and Armstrong were both born in New Orleans. The music was wonderful. Everything worked: David Ostwald’s Louis Armstrong Band took us back to the swinging 1920s and 30s.
Graphic Lessons: What do a thirty-four-year old, a nine-year-old and an eighteen-year-old have in common? Murder.
Millie Fitzgerald applies for a private school teaching job, faints on a dying man in the school kitchen, deals with a troubled nine-year-old and with the eighteen-year-old niece of the murdered man.
Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who never listens or accuses her of lying? Her father who’s started a new family in Singapore? She tells Millie.
Graphic Lessons: NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek is assigned the murder case at the prestigious Windsor School. What’s bugging him? His partner being stabbed ? His hated boss, Captain Dick Holbrook, being a trustee of the Windsor School? Losing his girlfriend to Holbrook?