In Pittsburgh

1993 was another one of those transitional years - he started the year still living upstate New York but spent most of the year living in Pittsburgh and ended the year living back in Atlanta again.  

It was definitely time for him to leave New York State.  He was still working for the same environmental engineering firm that he had joined in Atlanta in 1984 and when they made him an offer to finally leave Albany and manage their struggling Pittsburgh office, he leaped on the opportunity and rented a loft apartment in a former doll factory in Pittsburgh's Shadyside neighborhood.  Pittsburgh felt satisfyingly urban after his six years upstate, but it was a bad year for the economy and the office there barely broke even.  By the end of the year, he had to make the difficult decision to close the office and by December he had successfully found other jobs for the staff there.  He wound up living back in Atlanta again, working at the firm's flagship office.

He had liked it in Pittsburgh, though.  He liked it that the city had so many different neighborhoods, each of which was distinct and unique from the others.  His neighborhood, Shadyside had a jazz club, The Balcony, that featured Big Band Night every Wednesday.  The South Side seemed to be composed almost entirely of bars and clubs and was a fun place to visit.  The Strip District (not what you think - it was characterized by strips of warehouses) had a pair of nightclubs, Rosebud and Metropol, that featured live music.    

It was around this time that an alternative form of hip-hop had started to emerge.  Atlanta's Arrested Development came out with their debut album 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of. . . the year before, and A Tribe Called Quest had released The Low End Theory the year before that.  Us3's overtly jazz-influenced Hand on the Torch would drop later that year, but the summer of 1993 was the season for Digable Planet's Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) and its single Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat).  The band featured three rappers, Ladybug, Doodlebug, and Butterfly (aka Ishmael Butler, who would later go on to form Shabazz Palaces), and their record sampled some of his favorite jazz artists, including Don Cherry, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Herbie Mann, Herbie Hancock, Grant Green, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.   

Anyway, it was all pretty heady stuff, and it was probably the period he was most involved in hip-hop.  He even got to see Digible Planets perform that year at Rosebud in the Strip District.  So, if he had to pick one single song to represent the year 1993, which otherwise had so many changes of address that music sort of faded into the background, it would have to be Cool Like Dat, because to this day every time he hears that song, he remembers the smoky interior of Rosebud and his brief time living in Pittsburgh.