Monday, September 5, 1966: the Blues Project and Robbie Basho, still at the Matrix.

The listing for this night is two names and nothing else, which is the whole of what survives — but the band it names was weeks from making the record it is remembered for. *Projections* was cut in three days with very little preparation and released that November, reaching number 52. The lineup working the Matrix that week is the one on it: Danny Kalb on guitar, Al Kooper on keyboards, Steve Katz on guitar, Andy Kulberg on bass and flute, Roy Blumenfeld on drums.

Kooper had played the organ part on Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" the previous year, uninvited and largely by improvising his way onto the session. Within a year he and Katz would leave to found Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Kulberg would go on to Sea Train — who turn up in this chronicle three years later, second-billed to Santana at the Fillmore West.

Sharing the week was Robbie Basho, playing solo steel-string guitar in the raga-influenced American Primitive style he and John Fahey were separately inventing on the Takoma label. An electric blues band from New York and a solo acoustic mystic, six nights running, in a hundred-capacity pizza shop.