I was playing with the late Bill Carey and he was helping the Old Skool Cafe run by Teresa Goines. She has school for teaching restaurant skills (hands on- management, service, cooking,) for high school problem kids under 18.
In photo: Bill Carey- Sax, Vaughan Johnson -Piano, Matt Scrabis- drums at Simple Pleasure Cafe. October 28, 2012 estimated.
She needed some older pro players to play jazz on the weekends for tips and food for a year. Afterwards the students would eventually be featured and take over. Bill and I decided to split the weekends to give more variety of jazz styles. He would feature his bop quartet and I then started my own band calling it: Diamond Head Jazz. We would feature different players and vocalists depending on who was available. One of our performances was on Fox News on June 1 2013. Our 5 seconds of fame.
After the gig ended I decided to expand the group with Katrine Spang-Hassen, Bobby Simcox and Ruben Salcido from jazz to include funk, R&B, rock report-ire. Our close friends: Wendell Hanna and Ron Purser (Pacific Fault Band) also helped us get established on the coast restaurants, bars, wineries. and we evolved slowly to today’s current line up.
Photo: Wendell Hanna, Ron Purser, Dennis Kong @ The Poor House Bistro