Why Twin Cities music rules

​On a Monday night last year, I went to the Clown Lounge for Jazz Implosion. I go fairly regularly now, but at the time, I'd only been a handful of times. More or less hosted by Fat Kid Wednesdays (unless someone is on tour), Jazz Implosion has been a Twin Cities' mainstay for years. It's an establishment, and so we more or less don't think about it.

But on this particular Monday, sitting in a booth tucked alongside the stage left wall (if you could even call it a stage--the musicians just move the couch and coffee table out of the way and set up), I found myself thinking about what it means to have Jazz Implosion here in the Twin Cities. I though about it while I watched Fat Kid Wednesdays (Michael Lewis on saxophone, J.T. Bates on drums and Adam Linz on bass) and munched on the homemade Sloppy Joe I'd gotten from a crock pot brought by Bates' wife. The bun was the soft, perfect, generic kind you get at Rainbow; the meat was warm and smokey. And I thought of everyone who leaves.

Spend any amount of time in or following the music scene here and you'll hear a typical complaint: I'm sick of the venues, or I want to try out another scene, or I want to start a new scene somewhere. We all get restless; there's no crime in that. And, by all means, I would recommend that anyone go and explore New York City (to name the most common destination) or San Francisco or Seattle. But I would just not ask them to be surprised when they realize how good they had it here.

Things like Jazz Implosion just don't happen everywhere. I know: I lived in Connecticut. Had you told me, six years ago, that there was a weekly night of adventurous jazz in the basement of a rock club, that there were regularly crowds of fifty to seventy-five people for these shows, that they often had cheap, homemade Sloppy Joes complete with sweet pickles to go on top, I would have said you were crazy.