In the midst of loading in for the Yacht Rock gig Saturday afternoon, I got a call for a last minute trio gig in Atlanta. Two days later, we were set up in the corner of a hotel ballroom downtown, ready to provide music for eating. The room was set up to look like a giant southern family meal under an oak tree, which launched us into a conversation about what percentage of southerners actually drink ice tea from mason jars.
Easy stuff for us. We played about a half hour, took a forty minute break, played about forty minutes, took a twenty-five minute awards break, and played about twenty-five minutes. The gig ended an hour earlier than contracted. Yes!
It's always fun to play with Kevin and Tyrone, both of whom were outstanding. We played a couple of new one tunes and a bunch of the usual stuff (mostly my tunes--who else is playing them?). I lucked into playing a half hour of solo saxophone in the pre function area outside the ballroom before the doors opened, which provided a good warm up.
Surefire way to tell the gig was over: production guy, eagerly wrapping a cable, wiggled between Tyrone and his amp while Tyrone was soloing. Nothing is sacred! Another guy walked between Kevin and me during the bass solo.
As soon as we stopped playing, the pipe-and-drape guys were in there taking down the backdrop. One guy was pulling the drape part through the band as we were frantically trying to pack up and get out of the way. He narrowly missed pulling my new soprano over. Not cool. Five minutes would have been enough time for us to get out of the way.
Anyway…I thought my recording was going to be good because we were running into a mixer that was patched into the PA, and I had my recorder coming out of the mixer too. Unfortunately, I plugged into the wrong jack on the recorder…foiled again by my own stupidity. Here's audio from my camera instead.
