Look, I'm gonna give it to you straight, man: I'm the only musician so far a fictitious band called The Hip Joint Replacements (and I use the term "musician" lightly). I'm Nils R. Bull Young & I play saxophone. About 40 years ago I used to go over to the "other side" of town (Dayton, Ohio) to sit in with a bunch of folks who showed up at Ace Davis' "Jazz Lab." It was religious experience.

Then I joined the US Navy, sold my horn & forgot about playing saxophone for six years or more. For something like 35 years I got no closer to playing a saxophone than most folks get to becoming naked Hindu monks at the foothills of the Himalayas.

But one evening a year and some back I was folding underwear & watching the BET-Jazz channel. At some point they showed John Coltrane playing a soprano saxophone. I stopped folding stuff for a second & wondered how much one of those horns cost. Then I went upstairs to consult the InterWeb. A couple weeks later I had a cheap Taiwanese soprano in a pressure molded plastic case & a box of reeds. I started playing again.

I took the soprano with me on our annual South Carolina beach vacation that summer. Every evening, after sunset, I'd go down to the water line and serenade the shrimp. One fellow & his wife stopped by where I was toodling away and said that it sounded nice. Another elderly lady, seeing me headed for the beach the next evening, said that she enjoyed hearing "the beautiful music." Elvis hadn't quite left the beach. I started thinking about getting together with other folks like me who just wanted to play some jazz.

At which point we get to the part about a band that exists in name only & the personnel of which band exist only inside my head. Well, except for the bass player, but that's another story.

If you're wondering about the band's name, it's actually a stretched metaphor. I'd like to form up the kind of band you'd get to replace the regular band at some hip joint where jazz is played & cigarettes are not smoked. We'd play slightly post-bop/neo-bop, bluesy, old-school, hip "traditional" jazz. No junkie music. No Scientology music. No weird, freaked out "free jazz" music. No endless rehacking of whatever with 45 minute solos and such. Nice tunes for nice people by a bunch of folks I may yet find somewhere in the neighborhood.

If you want to read about the history of the ensemble, click on the pointer . . .