Thursday 9/18. Rosa's Lounge. The James Wheeler Blues Jam.

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Open mic night at Rosa's attracted a motley crew of musicians- the bad, the earnestly aspiring and even the sublime. A large group of us sat through the contrived hip-thrusting and crooning of the open-shirted, Robert Plant-esque singer of the second set, feeling empathetic embarrassment for the other musicians on the stage when the would-be frontman thanked 'his' band at the end of the set. A somewhat diminished group stuck around for what turned out to be a HOT third set that featured Tony, the son of bar-tending Mama Rosa herself, on the drums. The guest guitarist whose name was difficult to catch but was probably McCormac pulled gasps and yells from the little crowd in the little blues joint as easily as he pulled notes from the electric guitar, the energy of his performance tightening the little room and causing the glasses on our table to jump in equal and opposite reaction to the palms and fists beating against it in wild imitation of the sounds Tony was creating, or in our heads ought to have been creating, on the drum set under the sign saying 'Rosa's'. And at one point during the infinite sustain of one treble note on electric guitar, the pitch holding the same but the tamber squeezed into shape after shape like an orange or a piece of balloon, we all four at the table looked at each other and knew that here, in Chicago in September, on an empty stretch of Armitage Ave between Humboldt Park and Logan Square, we'd found what we came for. Sweet home Chicago.