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It's an old story: Struggling musician works a day job to supplement the meager wages earned while playing late-night club dates.
Bassist Jennifer York is no exception. But her day job starts when most after-hours jazz clubs are still going strong. She's up at 4:30 a.m., gathering her wits and her makeup. She arrives at Van Nuys airport by 5:15 and, by 5:30, as the airborne traffic reporter for KTLA Channel 5 News, York, her cameraman and the pilot are lifting off in Skycam 5.
"Looking a little green this morning," says the cameraman as he hits York with a spotlight.
"I was up till midnight," she counters, teasing her hair and smoothing her makeup while unscrambling the traffic information that's pouring into her headset.
There's a spilled load of bicycles on the San Gabriel Freeway, and Skycam 5 will be there to document the backup. York props a pair of stuffed animals in the copter's window, scribbles some notes on her clipboard and turns to face the camera mounted in the rear of the cockpit.
A couple of nights later, York, whose quartet plays Saturday at the Southern California Jazz Festival in Irvine, can be found fiddling with her bass amp on the tiny bandstand inside Tribeca, a sleek Encino restaurant and watering hole.
Her quartet-with saxophonist Janine Del Arte, drummer Suzanne Morissette and pianist Alexandra Casselli-moves into the familiar strains of "Autumn Leaves." Wearing a short blue dress speckled with white polka-dots, she leads the way, playing an upright that makes her, although she is tall, seem small.
For the second set, she switches to electric bass guitar, pounding out the rhythmic vamp of Grover Washington Jr.'s "Mr. Magic." During her solo, she slaps the strings in the heavyweight style of bassist Marcus Miller (one of her heroes), combining rhythmic and melodic elements in a way that causes a knot of patrons at the bar to shout their approval.
Later, she's back to the upright for Cedar Walton's Latin-flavored "Bolivia" and on to "My Favorite Things," the pleasant ditty from "The Sound of Music" that saxophonist John Coltrane developed into his personal declaration of freedom.
York, 31, twists and turns with the beat, obviously deep within the music and enjoying herself mightily....