The Community Music Hangout gathered on Sunday, March 17th for the 48th edition of the Hang. Just two more ‘til 50! Four more until a year’s worth of Hangouts! Good stuff. We gathered under brilliant sunshine, which would bake us throughout the long and glorious day of making music with friends new and old. We gathered around the newly-donated and exceptionally beautiful Steinway upright piano now located on JFK for all to play. There were some rumors that this piano had been named after a drummer, I’m not sure what that’s all about, but the name of this piano is Freddie. As in Mercury! Nice. As I wheeled down the hill towards the piano, I saw Phil was already on the scene. He was first to arrive and still there at the end of the day. Impressive! I love when people come back to the Hangout and I really love when they stay all day. That’s a strong statement about the fun they’re having to come back and stay long. And Phil has only been playing guitar for 6 months, and I think he’s doing great to come out and play with others. Great practice, keep it up! He also offered to share his guitar with other players. That’s always up to the instrument owner, but also always appreciated and in keeping with the Hangout spirit. Thanks! Soon, Hangout regulars Joe, Kyle, Brian, and Zach showed up. Kyle and Zach make up the most common rhythm section at the Hangout. And I just love that we pulled a rhythm section together from people we met at the piano. Awesome. Then, Eugene turned up and played some lovely jazz piano. Hope to see you back around the piano soon, sir. And on the opposite end of the experience spectrum, we had young Mateo on saxophone. Great to see you again, little man! Great playing, keep up the hard work! We were rolling right along when we met Remi, another lovely jazz pianist. Thank you for joining the Hangout, hope to see ya again! We also had Gavin joining in on fiddle and guitar. Glad you finally made it out to the Hangout as well. Come on back and bring Nina with you, too! Around this time, we tried an experiment with comedy and music. I’d recently met comedian Lucas Larson. He runs a weekly showcase at a new comedy venue in the Mission called the San Francisco Comedy Attic. Together, we hatched the idea of trying to combine music and comedy to see if it would be funny. We gave it our first try, with no preparation or really even any discussion before we began. We just went for it! And, you know what? It was pretty funny! I think the players and comedian all left with ideas to try for next time. So keep an eye out for that in the future and hop on over to the Mission on Saturday nights to catch Lucas’ comedy showcase. The day was flying by at this point. Perfect weather, perfect piano, perfect company! Soon, we saw Paul with his melodion. Nice to see you again! And we met Frank with his mandolin. Nice playing, come on back to the Hangout soon! The Hangout has been going on for about 17 months now, and there are some folks we met early on out there who we hadn’t seen in a while. Ted is one of those guys! We met in February last year probably at CMH #4 or 5! And he came back yesterday and sang a great rendition of Country Roads. Nice to see you again! In a similar vein, we saw Lilianna again. We last saw her in the summer time and she was back! Great singing. Thank you for adding to the Hangout As we got close to the end, we had two more excellent singers to feature. Kyle and I met both of thse singers at the jazz jams we run (every Monday at Waystone in North Beach from 6-9 and the third Wednesday of each month at The Lucky Horseshoe in Bernal Heights from 8-11!). It’s great seeing both of them at the Hangout, I hope they come back. They are Caesar and Nat (Nat asked Caesar if he had a nice Ides of March, which made me laugh). Both sang beautifully! Thank you for adding your voices to the mix. It was way after 4pm by the time we packed it in for the day. The vibes were just so good, we had to keep it going as long as we possibly good. It was a fantastic day. Thank you to all who took part, who stopped by, who offered a smile and etc. It’s the best part of my week and I’m already looking forward to doing it again, possibly on Saturday, but we’ll see how the conditions are.