The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

_{Joe Fornabaio}

Please join us for dinner and jazz on Wednesday, February 27 at T's Place, 2713 E. Lake St. Minneapolis.

A gauntlet of black-and-white portraits of jazz luminaries lines the walls of the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant on the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. Nearly all of these musicians have appeared at the Dakota in one of its two incarnations. The trick with this sort of self-promotion-as-interior-decoration is in the execution.

The European sun shines on James Coburn, his lean frame in a white Mod jacket with red turtleneck. Putting on enormous sunglasses and flashing his classic chops, he sidles out of the palm-tree fringed villa, where he has just spent the night with Monica Vitti, and slips into his silver Ferrari. Bound for another criminal adventure involving diamonds, art, or cold hard cash, he speeds onto a cliff-side road, which just happens to overlook an endless body of crashing blue water.

My mother took me on a wild, unforgettable ride the morning she died. Drugged and nearly comatose for about twenty-four hours, she suddenly started breathing heavily, opened her dull, mucus-covered eyes, and began writhing her shoulders off the bed. I was holding her hand, and she gripped me so hard that her bones stabbed painfully into my palm. This intense, disquieting resistance lasted between five and ten minutes, and then Jeanne Northridge Robson was dead from cancer at age fifty-nine.

At times during his monthly performances at the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, Cuban-born Nachito Herrera seems less intent on playing the piano than on consuming it—greedily, octave after octave—his thick, muscular fingers tenderizing the keys under a barrage of powerful yet precise blows, his stocky frame bouncing up and down on the bench like a little boy waiting to rip open presents on Christmas morning. This is the Nachito described as “Explosive.

Smooth jazz killed my brother Randy. He was coming into the S curves on I-5 just south of Seattle, listening to radio KYEZ, “Mellow Sounds of the Spheres,” when the music transported him into a trance-like state and he crashed into the side of a sixteen-wheeler bringing engine parts into Boeing.

I called Randy on his cellphone moments before his death. We had planned to meet at Safeco Field for a Promise Keepers convention and he was late. Outside in the parking lot, I could hear they had already started the sobbing and back-slapping without us.