Barbara Gettes connected with Raph Cutrufello via Myspace while she was living with her boyfriend in New York. They met in a park, and she remembers being so nervous that she was practically shaking. After a few years of collaboration and development, they decided to put this project together. The album is labeled: The Spinning Leaves and Hezekiah Jones performing as…Hezekiah Leaves & The Spinning Joneses. Gettes’ father recently passed away a year ago, and a number of her songs off of the album are dedicated to him.
The show started with Nic Esposito of The Savage Detectives telling a story about an ant’s perspective of the world, followed by trapeze artist Annie Plick gracefully floating over the seated crowd and a short acoustic set by Joshua Park. The Extraordinaires also did an AWESOME set of music to a seated crowd (which was rather lame). The Extraordinaires’ booker Monika Julien, my friend Dorian and I were pretty much the only ones standing near the front of the stage until the last two songs of their set when the band got people’s feet moving after much urging. Hezekiah Leaves & The Spinning Joneses played a pretty long set of charming little ditties while an artist did sketches next to the PA system. Sorry, I had more photos of the evening, but I’m pretty OCD about lighting and had some equipment issues so a lot of them didn’t come out the way I’d hoped. However, you can check out the ones that made the cut HERE. – David Turcotte