Return with us now to an earlier, seemingly more innocent time, when the San Francisco Bay Area was awash with youthful energy and promise, when the S.F. neighborhood known as SoMa was buzzing to a new sound, and a generation found its voice. When nightclubs such as the Paradise Lounge, the Up and Down Club, and Club Eleven teemed with young, affluent and partially educated cognoscenti, sprinkled with celebrities such as Christie Turlington, Rob Schneider and Charles Barkley.

It is, of course, naive to imagine that we could see this earlier era through rose-colored glasses, knowing too well how all this energy and promise came to such disappointment and ruin. The money ran out, the clubs folded, and the record companies moved on to some bright new oasis of cool. Today SoMa is a desolate and bitter landscape with too many places to park. Musicians who once played piper at the gates of the dot com dawn now hold down lonely straight jobs with no benefits.

The names of such endeavors such as Alphabet Soup, the Charlie Hunter Trio and Jazz On the Line now belong to history, architects of a musical gumbo as bold as the City's famous Nouvelle Cuisine. Musicians fled from all parts of the country to be a part of this vibrant and distinctive sound. Record contracts were being signed as fast as they could be printed, and among the brightest jewels in this crown was a little collaboration between friends, known as James T. Kirk.
Oops, I mean T.J. KIRK .

During their short lived life, T. J. Kirk, nursing the engorged breast of Warner Bros. and in collaboration with legendary producer Lee Townsend, made two highly regarded CDs that today fetch a tidy sum on eBay. The second of these two, 1995's "If Four Was One", was nominated for a Grammy. In addition, recordings of their incendiary live shows became widely circulated in collector's circles and over the internet. This live performance CD from 1997 represents the band's attempt to get a piece of the action.

That attempt, although not unmotivated by greed, is a belated acknowledgement on the part of the band as to the actual worth of their whimsical endeavor. T.J. Kirk was always a combustible mix of strong egos and musicians. Will Bernard and Charlie Hunter, the oldest and youngest members in the group, had both grown up in Berkeley and gone to the city's sole public high school, with its justly celebrated music program. Scott Amendola hailed from Tenafly, New Jersey, and brought to the band discipline and professionalism. John Schott, who a staff publicist at Warner Bros. once mystifyingly dubbed the "mad blues scientist" of the group, was an amateur musicologist from Seattle who, amazingly, had never played guitar until a week before the band's first rehearsal. Or so went the rumours. From the beginning it was often difficult to establish where the hype left off and the myth began.

The T. J. Kirk experience brought together the music of patriarchs "T"helonious Monk, "J"ames Brown, and Rahsaan Roland "Kirk," spiced with Little Richard, Prince, and Bob Wills, in a sensuous and heady brew of guitars, grooves, and historical anxiety. With a dizzying predilection for cutting across a wide range of stylistic genres and leavening the results with a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor, T. J. Kirk put on a musical variety show that was not to be missed. "It's like putting your head in a blender," commented John Schott, unhelpfully.

For two nights in December 2003, in defiance of all the pessimism, cruelty and solipsism we now take for granted, the four original members of T. J. Kirk - Scott Amendola, Will Bernard, Charlie Hunter and John Schott - came together to turn back the hands of time, to challenge San Francisco to make good on its promises, and to breath new life into the fetid corpse of their legendary collaboration. The DVD of that show will no doubt be available for the holiday season of 2009. In the meantime, here's this.
James T. Kirk.
I mean T. J. Kirk.

Jambase Review
TJ Kirk, Great American Music Hall, San Francisco – 12.27.03
January 9, 2004
Margaret Pitcher

For a band that hadn't performed since 1997, West Coast phenomenon TJ Kirk (a powerhouse line-up of guitarists Charlie Hunter, Will Bernard and John Schott and drummer Scott Amendola) generate a lot of spark. A jazz-funk "coverband" reinventing the music of Thelonious Monk, James Brown and Rassan Roland Kirk is certainly unique. But the TJ Kirk name and legend has survived much longer than the band's actually duration. Bay Area expatriate Charlie Hunter lends national credibility yet all four musicians are regarded in their own right with highly original and varied solo projects. The band is making good on its notoriety with the 2004 release of one of its "final" performances, titled Talking Only Makes It Worse. No wonder Saturday's hometown gig sold out amidst very stiff competition in pre-NYE San Francisco.
Given the caliber of musicians you might expect a full-on guitar slaughter with intense drums. True… but the show was more a groovy and joyous ride through a vivid landscape of jazz, blues and funk, punctuated by a taste of Beethoven, a heavy metal medley and other playful touches. The first set started off on a strong note and allowed the musicians to flex their bluesy chops with Schott's blues-style guitar and Hunter taking a turn on vocals. The band displayed its JB influence mid-set and even showed the gentler side of TJ Kirk with a lovely version of a Monk ballad featuring Bernard's fine slide guitar work.
However, the beast fully erupted in the second set when the band turned Monk on his ear and gave a taste of what this collective is capable of delivering. More funk, a bit of a bluegrass-roots mid-song, back to the jazz-groove and on with the fabled fez hats. During all this Amendola - a fantastic drummer who makes an impact without having to beat the skins to death - kept it all together behind the kit. The band wrapped it up with a Kirk composition before returning for an encore, but only after the baiting the enthusiastic audience who of course wanted more.
Throughout the show TJ Kirk's signature tongue-in-cheek humor shone through in the musicians' fluid exchanges and obvious enjoyment of performing together, even more so than in their stage antics and banter, entertaining as that was. There was enough room for each musician to solo in his own style, and the overall result was a cohesive song progression with lively improvisational moments.
An energetic romp through many different genres is a tactic that's become overdone yet in TJ Kirk's hands it sounded fresh. The hype around these shows likened the band to a rising corpse, but a more fitting analogy would be a recently awakened body that just exhaled from a deep breath. If TJ Kirk can stay inspired and not burn out on the requisite music business headaches (to which band "spokesman" Schott often alluded) then this hometown reunion run might be more than a one-off treat for Bay Area fans.

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