Soviet Son

Said What? It was at the 2003 Edinburgh Festival while we were preparing to start our first gig, when I was approached by the trumpet player from the Australian band which had just finished their set. A very talkative, congenial chap, he kept referring to the time we had played together in Oakland several years before. I had absolutely no recollection of ever seeing this guy anywhere in California and told him of the fact. He continually repeated the Oakland claim over and over and I kept telling him it wasn’t so. Finally, it dawned on me that he was referring to Auckland, NZ, not Oakland, CA. Sure enough, I had been on stage with him in a jazz session at an Auckland jazz club a number of years previously. I immediately apologized for not understanding his Australian accent and we were both delighted to have the problem finally solved. Hong Kong Surprise The Excelsior Hotel and Cathay-Pacific Air brought NGJB to Hong Kong in 1990 as part of a California travel and commercial promotion. The band performed ten consecutive nights while the wives shopped ten consecutive days [grin]. All in all, it was a delightful experience in one of the world’s most exciting cities and proved to be a very memorable way for Natural Gas J.B. to help celebrate its twentieth year together. However, there was one disquieting incident that deserves mention. We were contracted to start our gig at 9:0