Casuparu Plays With Jam

Konichiwa everybody!

Now for the promised blog on Caspar's jam session at What the Dickens. Tuesday night two weeks ago (again I am two weeks late for this thing) Caspar and I went to What the Dickens for a night of jamming. Caspar had heard about it one of our earlier trips there and had decided that he wanted to get up on stage and jam with other equal minded folks.

(On the subway line to What the Dickens)

When we came there, the place was already filled with people and the atmosphere was great. Happy people all around and good music on stage from the jamming musicians. There was a board with different categories based on musical instruments and Caspar put his name down under the guitar category, obviously. There were a few other persons on the board before him, so we just sat down at a table with a pint of Bass - a very tasty beer.

We sat down at a table with another person that was also going to play up on stage. He was a saxophonist and pretty damn good. I didn't get to talk too much with him as I went around and took photos. Sadly the technology inside my camera shows its shortcomings when I am in a dark place, trying to photograph moving people. My camera makes the photos very grainy at higher ISOs which is what I need to use to get more light in my images while still having a shutter speed fast enough to capture moving people. ISO is the light sensitivity of the sensor that captures the photo. It can be adjusted to higher settings but the sensor in my camera gets confused when it has to capture more light like that. Some of the pixels in the sensor takes a wrong reading, resulting in a mis-color in that specific spot. And when a lot of these pixels make a wrong reading, there will be a grainy look in the photo. All this explanation I just wrote is only to excuse the poor quality of the photos.

Now for some of the better ones from that night. Below is the saxophonist I mentioned earlier.

(The saxophonist sitting at the table)

(The saxophonist jamming on stage)

(Caspar playing at the table)

(A very happy and upbeat guitarist)

(Here I tried to capture people dancing)

When it was finally Caspar's turn to get on stage that thing called "bad luck" played up. The singer that was also put on the board to be singing at the same time Caspar was playing had a very asshole-ish attitude like "I own this place and the other musicians are just here to play for me". That is not really the attitude you should put up on a jam night. When he got up on stage and saw that Caspar was rigging up his guitar, he started yelling for a guy called Bill; "We want Bill on guitar! Where is Bill?! Get Bill up here!". He yelled these three short sentences many times while Caspar was trying to explain to him that he was scheduled to play before this Bill guy. The arrogant asshole just ignored Caspar and his explanations until he couldn't ignore him anymore without seeming too much like the asshole he really was to everybody else.

After that frustrating start, the music they played was kind of okay, but afterwards Caspar didn't feel like he had nearly as much fun as he had hoped for in the beginning of the night. Below are some photos of the guy; very big designer sunglasses at night and a scarf on with 25 or so degrees Celsius outside. Really café smart. This, along with his attitude, didn't give him much of a pleasing appearance in my eyes.

(The guy that made things not fun)

(Caspar playing and having as much fun 

as he could under the circumstances)

(A photo of the full stage)

The late time slot Caspar was given meant that we didn't have much time after he was done playing, before we had to catch the last metro train back to our place. It actually meant that we missed the last train from the last station and we then had to walk home. Luckily enough, the way was simple as we just had to follow one road until we reached home.

All in all it was a good night that just turned sour in the end.

That was it for this time.

Until next issue of Toyboy in Tokyo hits the streets, take care!