Wrung through the wringer. The whole week has eaten your lunch. The critics in your head are screaming and your blood pressure is about to explode. It's time for a trip through Edward Hopper's gently tough, starkly austere, and classily jazzy America. With Joe Strouse as your guide, you will take a relaxing walk over Williamsburg Bridge in the Lower East Side. You will experience the joys of early summer morning bucolic life from a previous generation, and the quiet excitement of discovering a significant room in a new house. As the hours pass, suspicions regarding the true nature of a late night office job transition into a side trip to Weehawken, painting a foreboding portrait of dark economic times. Off in the desert, through the depiction of a motel, the deterioration of a relationship moves the next day toward it's night. The relief of a well-earned sleep comes to an end with a poignant account of waking Sunday morning to memories of persons here and gone, and resuming the journey to embrace the old-fashioned ambiance of a 1920's gas station. Further on down the dusty road, a mysterious stop into an automat reveals the ambiguity of a potential romantic inception, which cascades finally to the California hills, where love and loss jostle each other to the ground. These travelogue vignettes, taken either individually or as a complete entity, evoke the smoky atmosphere of a dusky wee hour bar in the sparsely populated lobby of a gradually hushed hotel, and are embodied by melodic lyrics and lyrical melodies, as well as the smooth and adventurous nocturnal reeds of Bob Paskowitz. - Stewart Moser.
