The Blue Chunks and Friends
An Evening of Performing and Visual Arts
Sunshine Brooks Theater
Oceanside, CA

February 26, 2011

The Sunshine Brooks Theater hosted a stirred-up gumbo of entertainment, main ingredient jazz, on Saturday, February 26, in the old movie house that sits in the historical heart of the city of Oceanside, San Diego County's northernmost beach town, on what used to be called Hill Street, and is now named Pacific Coast Highway. For the old timers, it's Highway 101, the original route between Los Angeles and San Diego before Interstate 5 sliced through the coastal mesa on what was then—the early sixties—the east side of the city.

The seventy-five year old downtown movie house—that devolved in the 1960's into an "adult theater"—has regained a good measure of its original classy sheen, hosting open mic poetry readings, community theater plays, and live jazz, including, on a blustery, rainy winter night, The Blue Chunks, a Vista, California-based ensemble featuring a flexible line-up anchored by bassist Scott Gressitt, guitarist Dan Cassina, soprano and tenor saxophonist Troy Jennings, and drummer Gusso Morrison.

A mixing of artforms—poetry, paintings, spoken word and flash fiction and music—was deftly co-hosted by the lovely and very funny Coco Tanner and the also very funny and occasionally cross-dressing (he claims to have stumbled into the wrong changing room) Conner Gressitt.

The sprawling hodgepodge of a show began with with the slinky groove "6-9 Blues" by the Blue Chunks, showcasing Dan Cassina's Frank Zappa-like guitar noodlings inside a cohesive ensemble momentum, followed up by the band-accompanied poetry from the night's renaissance man, Nino DeGennaro. The Blue Chunks churned into an extended jam, post-poetry, then segued into "A Child is Born" before bringing DeGennaro back to do a cool,