In case I haven’t mentioned her often enough in this blog, my first niece, Rebecca Jade, has made a career as a singer. In 2024, she performed with saxophonist Dave Koz on his Mediterranean tour. Then, she flew from Greece to Portugal for another gig, followed by a jazz festival in Indonesia. My family got to see her in Elmira in August.
Once again, she’s on the Dave Koz and Friends Christmas tour. I attended a performance on Long Island back in 2021 without my wife and daughter, much to the chagrin of my child. So this time, we decided to trek down to New Haven, Connecticut, when we discovered Rebecca would be singing there, the closest she’d get to Albany, NY.
We stayed at a timeshare, which was more complicated to describe here, except that entertaining and parking were challenges.
My daughter took the train from western Massachusetts, and my wife and I drove. We picked her up at the Union Station in New Haven. (There are lots of Union Station railroad locations in America.) After that, we got something to eat at a restaurant.
The John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts at Southern Connecticut University was the venue. We parked in the spillover section.
Unlike the last time I saw her, when she didn’t appear until song five, she appears right off with Dave’s longtime cohort Jonathan Butler, saxophonist Vincent Ingala, and guitarist Adam Hawley.
Just Another Christmas Song
The musicians appeared on the stage in various combinations. Each of the other artists received their own time to shine. Rebecca, for instance, had a chance to sing the first song from her Christmas EP, Just Another Christmas Album. The song is Just Another Christmas Song (This Time I’ll Sing Along); you can hear it (or order it!) on Bandcamp, Apple Music, or Spotify. (Just dropped: a video of Merry Christmas, Darling.)
As was the case three years ago, a highlight of the evening was Rebecca Jade and Jonathan Butler singing Mary, Did You Know; here’s a 2021 performance in San Diego.
The one downside is that the stage lights hit many of the audience members right in the eyes. They were small but powerful and irritating. Later, I discovered that the lights are usually positioned in a larger venue, where that would not likely happen.
After the show, some of us got to meet the artists backstage. Rebecca took us to the tour bus. They may seem exotic and fun, but it’s not all glamorous, given that ten people travel in this vehicle. It does get them from place to place; they went from New Haven to Cleveland, an eight-hour ride, to perform the next night before they had a couple of nights off.
The next morning, after we left our temporary abode, a marathon took place on the streets north and south of us. So the restaurant that happened to be across the street, Icaru, a Peruvian place, had no customers. We ate there, and the food was very good. Then we drove to Union Station, dropped off the college student, and my wife and I went home.
Here’s my dad’s cousin Ruth (R) with two of her children. My sister Leslie and I saw her in October 2022 at the church we all grew up in, Trinity AME Zion in Binghamton, NY. She pointed out a room that used to be a Sunday school classroom where my paternal grandmother Agatha Green used to teach Sunday school to me and a bunch of other kids. It is now a room of noted members of the Trinity family, and she asked us for large photos of our parents for the wall, which we still need to get for her.
In July 2024, sister Leslie was in Binghamton for her high school reunion. She went to see Cousin Ruth. Ruth gave her a whole bunch of information about the genealogy of the Walker clan. Ruth’s father was Earl; Earl was my paternal grandmother’s brother, so Ruth was my father’s first cousin. She was over a dozen years younger than him, so she didn’t know all the early stories about my father, but she knew him like a big brother.
After seeing the first niece at the Elmira Jazz Festival, I realized that the connections made became a reunion of Rebecca Jade and the Walkers, her ancestors on her mother’s side. But it wasn’t easy.
Dr. SCOTUS Will Now See Your Next Patient – Ron Harman King fears our 
Look Like a 