Album Notes

The back room at Mr. Toad has a line of seats against its far wall that is made of salvaged church pews; the fading light of a warm summer evening floats in through stained-glass windows. The décor isn’t wrong—for many of us, it is a kind of church that we come to every Sunday, where Luigi Inc. has been playing for decades.
Like religion is supposed to, the music, at its best, gives us a vision of what we can be, a glimpse of a world of concepts and emotions beyond the limited vision of our everyday grind. And for thousands of Sundays, Luigi was the shaman that guided us on that vision quest. And we kept coming back.
One thing that Luigi is emphatic about is that the band does not play requests. As he puts it from the stage: “Please put in your requests. We won’t play ‘em, but how are we ever gonna get to talk to each other otherwise?” To his way of thinking, just as with a classical concert, jazz musicians selected a program of material that they wanted the audience to hear. Why don’t they get the same respect that those other musicians get? I mean, when you go to a string quartet recital, you don’t hear people yelling, “Beethoven’s A Minor! Play the A minor!”—do you?
Actually, as with all things, Luigi let the band decide what they were going to play. When it was someone’s turn to choose a tune, he would turn to him and ask, “Whattda ya got?” It was as much a challenge as a request. What can you bring? What are you capable of? In addition to being a great musician and teacher, Luigi was always a great bandleader. Part of what made him that was the ability to create an atmosphere in which each player could be him or herself, but at the same time, creating an expectation that would push them to perform to their highest potential. In this regard, he also always encouraged the band members to contribute their own compositions to the repertoire. It was always a source of awkward excitement when we’d see a band member passing out copies of the sheet music to a new piece that had come freshly from their pen.
When you know how Toad’s works, you know to get there early to get a seat, before it starts filling up. If it’s the summer and it’s still a little light at 8:30, you can watch the street start to clear as many of the businesses close, and the rest of the street can take on a somewhat deserted feel. But you know you’re at the oasis, the way station in the night. And you can watch the last light falling in through that stained glass, onto the pews. And you know that’s how it should be.
Because you know that, for the Toad’s faithful, coming on Sunday is church for us. It provides transcendence and community. It helps you understand life, and gives you one more reason to live. Luigi is gone now, but whatever positive forces there are at work in the universe—even if that force is music itself—Mr. Toad was the altar through which he summoned those forces and shared them with us.
And for those who were there, and will be there to hear Luigi Inc. in years to come, the music and all that it brought with it will be part of our hearts forever.