Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Duo Duos

The Dave and Dave Duo was scheduled to play brunch and evening performances at Venkman's this past Sunday, but Ellington realized after I'd already confirmed the date that he would be out of town.  No big deal.


Matt Kaminski covered the brunch gig.  Dave and I have been playing this batch of tunes for a couple of years now, so it was pretty cool to hear another organist's approach to tunes with which I was very familiar.  Pretty cool--Matt's got his own thing, his own vocabulary, sounds, and approach.  I dug it!  Sometimes I wanted to stop playing and just watch to see how he was doing things I'd never heard before.

photo cred:  Matt
I recorded both sets.  You can check them out here:




In between brunch and the evening, there was just enough time to kill that I considered going home.  To do what?  I guess I could've gone and sat on the couch for an hour, but I stayed and broke in some new reeds and got ready for my next partner.  This may or may not have been my best move--my embouchure was pretty tired by the time we stepped on stage.


Matt had a evening gig with his group at Churchill Grounds (and I don't know of another jazz organist in Atlanta), so I reached out to my old friend Tyrone Jackson to come and play.  He doesn't own an organ (yet!), but he brought his 88 key custom Fender rhodes out.  Sweet.  It sounds as good as it looks.

I joked with him that this is his "beater" rhodes because he has a restored 73 suitcase at his house as well!



Tyrone is an incredible player, and it took all the brain power and ears I could muster just to keep up with him.  I chose songs that we'd played quite a bit when we used to do a lot of trio gigs--some of mine, some that I thought would work well as duets.

It was also wonderful to catch up with an old friend with whom I've been sharing the stage off and on for probably fifteen years.  I hope we can do it again soon!

Here's the two sets we played: