Pardon the stream of consciousness on this entry. I’ve just got to get something out, so I can get back into the routine of putting down words again.

It’s late Saturday evening. I’m supposed to be back home in Denver, but it’s being pummelled by a snow storm so intense that Southwest offered to let us change our flights at no cost if we agreed to fly back on a different day.

So we’re here, unplanned, and today has been a lazy, soggy day of moving from one hotel to another, and spending a little time looking at the bay, and eating things. In no particular order.

But especially eating. It’s my favorite thing to do here.

But the reason we’re here at all this weekend is Magda Giannikou and her band, the (as she pointed out) very literally named Banda Magda.

This is my fifth trip to San Francisco. My first trip now seems like a fever dream from another lifetime. This was my fourth time seeing Magda play (I would say “seeing Banda Magda”, but the last time I saw her, she was fronting Snarky Puppy – or rather they were backing her, I suppose), but my memories of the first time are still very clear.

It was 2015, May, and the venue was Piedmont Park in Atlanta. Banda Magda was playing the Jazz Festival. My date was the woman to whom I’m now married. Her toenails were painted teal with white polka dots. We sat in the shade on a slope and listened.

The second time was also in Atlanta. It was October, the gig was at night, and it was raining. Or had been, at least? Magda was playing The Loft, which is a smaller performance space within the Center Stage complex. Adron, a local singer-songwriter opened, and was amazing. I love small venues, and this show was a good one for a small space. There’s nothing like being able to watch performers play.

In between these two shows, we had gone to Chicago to see Snarky Puppy play. I discovered Banda Magda through Snarky Puppy, because Magda was one of the performers who sang on their Family Dinner album. It didn’t take me long to buy both the albums Banda Magda had released at the time.

The third time we saw Banda Magda was also here in San Francisco, last summer. Snarky Puppy was touring, and at this show Magda was opening for them — with them as her backing band. It was too good an opportunity to pass up, and so very worth the trip from Denver.

Did I mention the part where we moved to Denver in the summer of 2016?

So that brings us to now. In San Francsico again, for another show at SFJAZZ. But this time it’s just Magda and her band that we’re here for.

Well, and food. But this entry isn’t about the food, even though San Francisco is always about food for me. Maybe I’ll just write about the dinner we had before the show, because it was so lovely.

A few blocks south of our hotel was the Hayes Valley location of a local chain of restaurants called The Grove. It was one of those nights where breakfast for dinner sounds like an amazing idea, and they served breakfast all day. They were, however, very crowded, and only did communal seating (in line with their faux ski cabin decor) or outdoor seating at tiny little cafe tables.

The temperature was only in the mid-to-low 50s, but the sun was down, and San Francisco is moist pretty much all the time. Last night it was downright clammy and threatening to rain, but we sat outside anyway to avoid the crush. It ended up being a delightful experience, thanks to the overhead heaters and lack of wind. We ate, we sat, we talked, and we watched people go by. We made plans for future trips. It was so calm and unhurried.

We really need that kind of thing more often.

Eventually it was time to walk to SFJAZZ, which was all the way on the other end of the block. I had thought that the show would be in the same performance space where we saw Snarky Puppy, but it turned out to be in a smaller space which looked out onto the street. It was incredibly intimate, and an amazing place to watch a performance.

The lab at SFJAZZ

…and what a performance. It was a short(ish) set, but in no way disappointing.

I know that I knew the first song. I know that it was a good performance. But I can’t remember anything about it because of what happened next: one of the best “alternate takes” on a song that I’ve ever heard.

There’s always the studio version of a song, and then the live version of a song. You can almost always count on the live version to be uptempo. It’s frequently a bit stripped-down. With bad bands the live version will sound worse, but good bands often sound better because they’ve honed the song over many performances.

And then sometimes a band just goes somewhere entirely new with a song; presents it in a completely different style or radical re-arrangement. My old favorite example of this was The Sun (Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas) by They Might Be Giants, which went from being a plodding sing-song mimickry of music from 1950s educational films (album) to a frenetic surf-punk cut (live).

But then last night happened.

Last night the second thing Banda Magda played was Tam Tam, a track from their newest album. And they took it from being a lushly instrumented piece dominated by strings and harp, to being a stretched-out, loungy, bass-and-percussion driven, funk/bossa nova piece that overloaded the happiness centers of my brain.

I’d love to let you listen to it. I’d love to hear it again. But it doesn’t exist anywhere outside of live performance, so far as I am aware.

The rest of the set, which I’m pretty sure was 4 other songs, plus one sing-along and an encore (Amour T’es La, the song which introduced me to Banda Magda) was joyful and rollicking, but for me nothing touched Tam Tam.

After the show I finally got to talk to Magda for a moment. I asked if she’d considered a live album. She seemed surprised by the question, but said that she had, but wanted to find someone to handle filming that would do the songs justice. I shouldn’t have been surprised by this — if you’ve seen her videos, they’re done with as much attention as the arrangements of the songs themselves, often with quick cuts at key moments to focus on an instrument which is not at the fore of the mix.

Somehow, we got around to mentioning that we had come to San Francisco just for this show. She didn’t quite seem to believe it, but we assured her it was true. After a bit of back and forth on the point, she decided that we needed hugs for having come all that way, and we got a crushing 3-way hug from her.

It felt so very good to make someone happy by supporting them.

We said that we’d see her again – at next year’s Ground Up festival, if not sooner, and bade her a good night.