Winter is not here yet, but it has definitely RSVP'd this past week. Summer had finally shown up after slumming somewhere down south but only hung out for a couple of weeks before autumn served it its eviction notice. I know that in a few months we'll be longing for temperatures in the 50s, but right now it feels cold as hell out there.

Fortunately, it was hot inside the Chicago Theater last night, once everyone thronging the sidewalks stopped taking pictures of the marquee and squeezed themselves through the doors. As part of their Rent Party '09 tour, Steely Dan is playing complete albums in a few cities. Chicago is fortunate enough to have gotten Aja last night, and gets Gaucho tonight and The Royal Scam on Thursday. I wish I could go every night, but Laura and I could choose only one, so we agreed on Aja.

It was a fantastic show, with an incredible cross-section of great songs. I won't be posting a full review, but I do want to note a couple of things. First, this was the first show we've been to in a long time, with the possible exception of AC/DC, where the majority of the crowd appeared to be older than we. (Definitely not the case at, say, The Dead Weather a few weeks back.) Second, having listened to it countless times over the past 32 years, I can't quite put my finger on why "Deacon Blues" made me all teary last night. Maybe I, I want a name when I lose.

Setlist (Aja tracks in bold):

1. Black Cow
   
2. Aja
   
3. Deacon Blues
   
4. Peg
   
5. Home at Last
   
6. I Got the News
   
7. Josie
   
8. Black Friday
   
9. Time Out of Mind
   
10. Daddy Don't Live in That NYC No More
    
11. Bodhisattva
    
12. Babylon Sisters
    
13. Showbiz Kids
    
14. Hey Nineteen
    
15. Dirty Work
    
16. Do It Again
    
17. Don't Take Me Alive
    
18. My Old School
    
19. Kid Charlemagne

I had another misadventure on moving day, though I didn't know it for more than a week. AC/DC tickets were going on sale that same day, so I kept the cable modem and laptop set up while the movers were carting our stuff away. I had purchased a membership to the AC/DC fan club earlier so I could have access to the good reserved floor seats at Allstate Arena. My brother-in-law Tom and I had planned this all out.

Everything went fine at the time. I logged into Ticketmaster at ten in the morning, bought great seats, and went on my merry way. It wasn't until more than a week later that I looked at my bank statement online and saw that the $208.70 I'd been charged had been refunded to my card.

To make a long story short, I called Ticketmaster and discovered that I had forgotten to update my street address in their system. I had already updated the street address for my debit card, and when they ran a check later that day the two addresses didn't match. They sent me email (so they said) giving me 48 hours to call and resolve the problem.

I didn't receive the email. I didn't call. I lost the tickets.

Fortunately StubHub.com had tickets, and I was able to get a pair for not much more than I paid for the fan club membership plus the original tickets. The seats aren't as good, but at least we still get to go to the show. And the AC/DC fan club claim they will refund my membership since I couldn't use the ticket code they issued me.

Sunday evening Laura and I went to see jazz trio The Bad Plus play at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music. First of all, that theater on Lincoln Avenue is a great place to see a show—comforable, intimate, and acoustically welcoming (though it would be even better if people weren't coming in late all the time and if the ushers would keep their voices down). Second, I knew I liked these guys on wax, but holy shit they're great live.

The Bad Plus are masters of intricate time signatures, with an interplay that seems (clich´ though it is to say) telepathic. Ethan Iverson on piano hardly breaks a sweat, indeed hardly moves, as his two hands blur off in opposite directions performing contrary tasks and pounding out dangerous decibels, only to jump up from his seat just when you think he's too cool for school. Reed Anderson anchors things in the middle with a fat, woody bass sound that gives the music a fulcrum even as it hares off in unexpected directions. But the real show is drummer David King, who looks improbably awkward holding a pair of sticks but still manages to emulate the world's craziest clock mechanism, holding the beat in his teeth while it seems to explode with a flurry of jabs and kicks in every impossible directions, maybe even at right angles to spacetime itself. Laura said, "I've never understood before this how drums could be a voice of their own."

The band was excruciatingly tight, nowhere moreso than on their cover of the Ornette Coleman/Pat Metheny freakout "Song X," with its nervewracking periods of long silence. The originals were idiosyncratic and strong—and it was nice to be able to match each of the three players with his compositions in person—and the rock covers, including "Life on Mars?" and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," turned the source material inside out to expose the pulsing life inside to the light. (Was that sweat they wiped off their faces, or was it blood?) One of two enthusiastically received encore numbers was Neil Young's "Heart of Gold." You could have heard a pin drop as the players took their hands off their instruments and sang the chorus in sweetly hushed three-part harmony. A startlement on top of a surprise wrapped in citrus rind.

The Bad Plus are justly famed for their cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and while I'm sure many in the audience were hoping to hear it, my only mild disappointment was that they didn't play their version of "Tom Sawyer," from their new album Prog. But maybe that's for the best. Having heard Rush play it two weeks earlier, and with the harmonic disturbances still lingering in the ether, The Bad Plus adding their take might have set up sympathetic vibrations of awesome that would have melted Chicago to a plain of bratwurst-colored glass. We should simply give thanks for the miracles we did witness, and lived to tell.

Sadly, I will miss the Rush Snakes & Arrows tour in New York, as it will arrive in town just after we move. That's okay, though, because I hate going to Jones Beach, and Rush will play Chicago in September!

I am downloading the new single, "Far Cry," from iTunes as we speak.

If I could have just one cover blurb for Inclination the novel (no, don't get excited, this doesn't mean it's sold), it would be:

"Get your ticket to that wheel in space while there's time!"  —Donald Fagen