Friday: I had two gigs. The first was a quick quartet gig downtown at Ventanas, so I hired Louis Heriveaux, Kevin Smith, and Marlon Patton. Awesome gig! Those guys make my stuff sound like we play together all the time. It was very relaxed, but focused at the same time.
I was particularly impressed with Marlon. I do way more trio gigs than quartets, so I really noticed his input the most. He was super creative and read everything down without any problems. Could he be the Mark Cobb of my jazz world? I'm thinkin' yes. Listen to his stuff. Fantastic.
The jazz gig was two horns--tenor and soprano.
The second gig was Beatles (Please Pleaserock Me) vs. Rolling Stones (Main Street Exiles) at Smith's. I played on both. The Stones went first. We used the full horn section for what we could, and it sounded pretty good--really, we could stand to be a lot sloppier, but it's probably never going to happen.
The Beatles set was good, but really long. It felt like we were up there for a couple of hours. I guess it was because we played thirty two minute songs!
It was super loud. I was two feet from a sixteen inch crash all night, and my left ear was fried.
The Smith's gig was four horns--tenor, bari, flute, and piccolo, plus miscellaneous percussion.
Saturday: Please Pleaserock Me managed to snag a corporate party gig! We played at 200 Peachtree (the old Macy's downtown location). It's a really neat room. I'd never been in there before.
It was a rather daunting gig, going into it--four hours of Beatles? Did we have enough stuff? By the time we finished eating, the gig had gone down to three hours…and then we dragged the breaks out a little, and we had enough stuff. In the end, we padded it out with a couple of Yacht Rock tunes and everybody was happy.
For me (and I'll speak for Jason, too), it was a low intensity gig. Particularly in a situation like this where people were dancing (and the focus was on the early 4 piece Beatles stuff), there wasn't much to do but drink beer and pick our noses. Occasionally we would have to get on stage and clap two and four on the bridge of a song, but it was hard to get in the groove of playing because we'd be on for one, off for two. I took lots of bad pictures (posted immediately to Facebook) to pass the time. It was mostly a hang with friends.
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| Mark Dannells! |
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| Bencuya is my hero |
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| new wig? |
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| Ouch! Bari down! |
Sunday: The usual church gigs. Church gig number one: tenor and clarinet (though I have to bring flute and soprano because I never know what I'll need). Church gig number two: soprano and flute. In between there was a pretty good nap.
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