Which way to Wasabi?

You can’t miss it, it’s right smack behind the Manila Peninsula Hotel along Makati Ave., the Wasabi jazz bar that according to its operation manager has seen better days.

Which is a pity, because on Fridays and Saturdays when the bar features what it calls the Wasabi jazz weekends, only a handful of people are in attendance to listen to some excellent jazz, as good as any you’ll be able to hear this side of town.

"It’s not only here, but once I did the rounds of other restaurants and nightspots along Makati Ave. and Jupiter, and it’s more or less the same lean times," says Wasabi operations manager Beng Mariñas, aka Beng Wasabi.

"There were nights when the crowd was overflowing," Beng remembers of the bar’s peak days when jazz was king, the price of crude wasn’t so high, and people were generally more carefree and less cynical.

"Do you have any idea why it’s like this?" asks drummer Koko Bermejo, who is pounding the skins for Lynn Sherman on a Friday night, when one expects more people, especially the upscale Makati crowd, to part with their money for some drinks and music.

Beats me, I say. In the back of my mind I could only surmise that people are really hard up these days, or there’s something cooking in the political air. Couldn’t be underarm odor (if it’s you they’re talking about), bad breath (nag-improve na ba ang typing mo?), or dandruff (Charlie balakubak), explanations far too simplified.

But wait, the music’s cool, the beer ice cold, and the Japanese food good for the soul, and the night we are there, Lynn Sherman is singing old jazz standards, backed up by Bermejo, guitarist Egay "Koyang" Avenir, and a fellow on bass surnamed Harder (as in the "harder" they come) subbing for regular upright bass man Simon Tan.

The songs are more than mere footnotes to the memory, even for those afflicted with premature Alzheimer’s, because Cole Porter, John Lennon, Bob Marley, among other nameless ones for now come alive before our eyes, their ghosts transformed into the living flesh of Sherman’s voice and music.

She does a curtsey and says "danke" after each number, the applause spare as the band’s sound is full bodied.

A desperado at the bar writes on a piece of tissue his request, anything by Annie Lennox, specifically No More I Love You’s or the theme from Return of the King if the stars are propitious and the band knows the score.

Sherman though can barely decipher the chicken scratch of the song title, "No more...?", but obliges with Lennox’s version of the Marley classic Waiting in Vain.

If there’s one song that sticks to the fledgling skin of memory like a humid evening in Maytime Makati, then it must be Porter’s Night and Day, which Sherman and band invest with a logic and wondrous detachment almost like clockwork that leaves no room for regrets.

We are reminded of Benny Goodman’s "Paris" album on the ABC label, and how a look-alike of his in Negros Island died probably with the song I Love Paris playing in his deaf ears, but that’s another story, indeed far removed from Wasabi jazz nights. Or is it?

Some Goodman would make for fine piped-in music between sets, just to warm up the crowd or whatever’s left of it, or to keep the motley assortment of lovebirds, hangers-on and blind dates preoccupied while chewing their California maki.

Goodman with his April in Paris, and we with our monsoon in Wasabi.

Late in the second set, Sherman does a version of Lennon’s Come Together, and the band does exactly that. The Beatles song is so freewheeling it can practically lend itself to any interpretation, how much more Sherman’s jazz reading.

Special mention should go to the band – Bermejo keeping ample time and professionally ignoring all distractions, Koyang who short of reinvents the jazz guitar a la George Benson, even Harder who came and delivered with the rest of the boys.

Sherman, voice deep and sultry with just a hint of rough edge, held the Wasabi fort well, a pity the music had to end as the morning began to warm up, a sprinkling of night owl foreigners filtering into the joint presumably from nearby hotels. She really should learn more Lennox songs, her voice a virtual doppelganger of the former Eurythmics vocalist.

Wish we could say that we knew her when, except that we can’t. We knew her elder siblings in the old UP Village, the same community where we all grew up in. Now she tells me that her folks have since sold their place and moved to a house along Congressional Ave. But the house on Malamig still stands, but with different occupants, just as the jazz numbers she does for us still hit fine, but with different boarders. Again, another story with a cool, cold edge.