Making the Donuts, Week Two

Intense touring, week two! This week, we played four dates in the northeast.

Thursday: The gigging began at The Wellmont in Montclair, New Jersey. For some reason, we flew up reeeeeeeaaaaaaaaalllllly early (landing before noon), so we parked the van and went to lunch before loading in. For me, that meant...INDIAN FOOD! There are two Indian places basically across the street, so I went into one (which was completely deserted at 12:30 in the afternoon) and had a feast.

I believe this is chana saag (spinach and garbanzo beans)

We've played this room before, twice, I think. It's a monstrous cavern of a room--very pretty, but it could use soundproofing to deaden it. Having a lot of people in the room helps, too, but Michelle's birthday party had somewhere around 150, which didn't do much in that regard.

We played ok. The seven of us were pretty fried after a long day.

My funky corner hotel room

Friday: A side benefit of playing the birthday party Thursday night was that we could leave all of our gear set up on the stage, so we had the entire day to recover. After sleeping as late as I could, going for a run, and ordering more Indian food for lunch, I finally gave up and took a Lyft back to the theatre so that I could get a few hours of practicing in without bothering everybody else.

too cold to run outside!

lunch! Vegetable biryani and roti

woooooo

it's big!

After soundcheck, I went back across the street--keeping the streak alive! Once again, I was there at what I thought would be prime time (7 PM on a Friday night), but there was no one there.

the tried and true chana masala

The Wellmont was sold out. How did that happen? I want to say that there were something like three hundred people last time, but this go round was something like 2,100? Who knows. The floor was packed and there were people in the balcony (though it wasn't full all the way to the back wall). The Wellmont said is was sold out, so...it's sold out!

Pretty good gig, and the energy was obviously insane compared to the night before. I played pretty well, though my solo on Biggest Part of Me was a bunch of bullshit, and the harder I tried to play something meaningful, the worse it got. Other than that, though, a good night on the job.

I swapped out alto mouthpieces for this run, replacing my Sakshama Guardala Studio copy with a Vandoren V16 S+. The Vandoren had been my alto mouthpiece on my spare horn, and I've enjoyed it so much, I thought it might be time to try it on a gig. It seems like it's going to take a few shows to find the tuning, though.

This one was broadcast on Facebook, and you can watch it if you want.



Saturday: New York City. Once again, we had time to kill before load in, so we dispersed for an hour.

just to the right of this, there was a giant pillow fight going on

Another Irving Plaza sellout!

As luck would have it, there are Indian restaurants in Manhattan. This place was great.

vegetable curry

This gig was electric. The band was locked in from the first song, and the crowd was right there with us. Crazy.

Sunday: Boston House of Blues, located adjacent to Fenway. One of the only Houses of Blues that we haven't yet conquered.

For the sake of consistency, I want to point out that there's a good Indian restaurant just across the Massachusetts Turnpike--a ten minute walk!--from the House of Blues. I didn't go, though, because HoB provided a buffet.

It's also worth noting that the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory are both right around the corner, which means that I was within one square mile of a thousand sax players who play better than I do. Go away!

It holds 2500 people.

And guess what...another sellout!

Unfortunately, I played a GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING HORRIBLE TERRIBLE AWFUL SHOW! I played a wrong note in the intro of the first song and it got worse from there. After about an hour, I'd finally settled down (pretty decent solo on Biggest Part of Me), and then everything started going to pieces again before we finished. It was devastating to perform so poorly on such a big night. I hate myself. Sorry Boston. Let's blame it on my not getting any Indian food this evening.