No trip to eastside Los Angeles is complete without supping among the friendly, Continental-meets-Mandarin confines of The Dresden.
And no visit to that Los Feliz institution there on N. Vermont Ave. can ever be fully appreciated without then stepping one room over to catch the truly dynamic duo of Marty and Elayne Roberts.
As of April 1, this all-purpose husband and wife band has been swinging five nights a week for 34 gloriously camp years--long before Jon Favoreau put them in Swingers, proper. (And eons, respectively, before the hipsters damn near destroyed the neigborhood.)
To celebrate the union of two of the most indefatigable unionized jazzers in all of L.A. County, the very, very good people at HooplaHa (no, seriously, HuffPo named them one of the happiest places on the entire internet) have put together this short, but oh-so-sweet tribute...and if the crowd-sourced gods are smiling, too, there might just be a feature-length Marty and Elayne documentary coming to us soon.
For what it's worth, I still remember my first time hearing "Stayin' Alive (M&E Remix)."
With Blood & Sand in hand, my brother, sister-in-law and myself bellied up to three open seats at Elayne's piano--bass-side--and proceeded to revel in pretty much everything she and Marty offered up that Tuesday evening. It was fun made manifest. And when Marty, on bass, began to trade surprisingly robust eighths with Elayne (now on flute), well, we all enjoyed their kind of jazz all the more.
I then grabbed a business card from James Ferraro (son of original Dresden owner Carl, no, not that James Ferraro) and traipsed off on foot to find those bricks out in front of Glenn Danzig's old house.
I never did find said pile, but I did drive back to the Dresden later that week; Sunday night, to be exact.
But instead of pure Marty and Elayne goodness, alas, I had to suffer through the stylings of The Readys.
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