This is a very difficult post for me to write but acknowledging the passing of one of the coolest guys in B'game is necessary. I first met Andrew Speight eighteen months ago and wrote about him here. His vision for local jazz of the highest order continued to blossom as I noted here. He was the band leader for the regular mid-week gigs at the Broadway Grill and I last saw him there on Wednesday--the day before he died. You can get more of a sense of the man from this NBC Bay Area report. Andrew was a mainstay of the opening weekend at the new Keys Jazz Bistro in North Beach, as noted by his friend Simon Rowe in the NBC piece, and I told him so between sets that night.
My relationship with Andrew evolved from new acquaintance to being good buddies over the last eighteen months. I was a regular at his House of Bop club on Capuchino Ave. and he was a regular at my place for drinks, music and planning about bringing more jazz to B'game. Regardless of how obscure of a jazz record that was playing when he walked in, he would pick out the artists by name and expound on their playing and their personalities. After he did that with a particularly unusual album I was playing, I expressed amazement at the skill and he said, "it's not hard when you have played with the guy yourself". I often felt like I was sitting in his SF State class instead of my side yard.
The loss is hard to grasp when you understand what we had planned for B'game. His first album since the 1980's was recorded at his house last year. It's mixed, mastered and in the queue to be pressed with the working title "Live in Burlingame". The LP would help promote a Burlingame Jazz Festival that he hoped to arrange the weekend before or after the Monterey Jazz Festival when a number of his artist friends would be passing through the Bay Area and would be available for gigs. The plan was to have two or three venues to allow for the local kids to get some stage time. Andrew was an educator to the end. We lost a gem of Burlingame and all that could have been. Here he is at Keys Jazz Bistro on November 12. RIP.
Update: The local jazz community sent Andrew Speight off in style yesterday (Dec. 18) with a three-hour jam session at Broadway Grill. About 40 musicians sat in with the closing number featuring a 5 horn front line.
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