Manchester has more music than you can shake a stick at.

Like a backyard safari, we went musically exploring for a week and this is what we bagged: the noises, the scenes, the instruments, the bars and the people that make the city ring with sound.

There's a lot more, of course, but this is all we could fit in the back of the jeep-seven venues, seven nights of music.

Conversation
The Jim Mara Quartet at UnWined

By 8 o'clock, all seats are full, couches and tall tables and low chairs full of friends or, in two cases, couples catching up with their in-laws. Sconces on the walls and ropes of light circling the floor cast a glow like candlelight. Everyone is talking, catching up on stories-over ruby red glasses of wine or steaming pots of fondue-and the jazz quartet on the riser in the corner is doing the same, taking turns choosing songs, trying new things with old numbers, talking back and forth between sax, keyboard and drums, all underscored by the mellow voice of the bass. It's a conversation you could listen to all night.

On Sunday nights at UnWined, the atmosphere is less like a nightclub and more like hanging out at the house of a hip acquaintance, where you feel among friends even if you haven't met each other yet. Jazz is not easy to find in Manchester; if you want to listen, you have to make yourself available at a particular place and time. Sharing an evening with others who've done the same immediately warms you to their company.

"All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it," writes James Baldwin in the story "Sonny's Blues."

You can't blame the band. A little loud, they seem to be following the crowd's mood, playing for their own pleasure, only occasionally for us. Though every now and then the musicians reach for something more and find it. A passage connects, surprises with its intensity, and something opens a little wider inside us.

-Karen Marzloff

Dan J. Szczesny can be reached at hippo@hippopress.com.