Thursday: Slept on an airplane and woke up in Providence, Rhode Island. We've played this place before as a public gig, and someone who'd seen us booked us at Féte for her birthday party. Our arrival was early enough that we went to the venue, dropped our bags, and went to lunch.
Even after a leisurely veggie burrito, there was still loads of time for me to basically play everything I would work on when practicing flute at home, and I must admit, it was really nice to go through everything on a gig day. The backline rented for the evening finally showed up, though, and it was time to go to work.
I did really well in the backline roulette--two really nice keyboards, plus a super cool keyboard stand (a "Z" style one).
This was a strange gig. There were only about a hundred people in the room, which usually translates to a low energy evening, but my in ear mix sounded good and my keyboards sounded good--I don't know, I guess I was kind of in the mood. Maybe it was the second veggie burrito that I had for dinner?
Friday: Got on another plane and woke up in Indianapolis, where the van and trailer picked us up.
This was a charity/fundraiser gig back at the Vogue Theater in Broad Ripple. Even on our own gear, it was hard to get in the mood to play this one.
There is, however, an Indian restaurant down the street from the Vogue (actually, there are two, but one is about a block away, so that's the one), so...I present Aloo Dumm and a side of roti.
Anyway...this one. Some gigs, I worry that I'm going to close my eyes when I'm playing and accidentally fall asleep, and my dream will be so vivid that I won't know I'm out. This was one of those. I could never get going on this one.
Saturday: It's down I-65 we go.
The final stop of this trip was Louisville, gigging at the Mercury Ballroom. I like this room.
Nothing to report from soundcheck. With no Indian food within walking distance, I decided to try Ethiopian food. I can't figure out what the name of this is, but it was basically salad, pickled cabbage, and some kind of red lentil stuff. You tear off pieces of the pancake looking stuff and use it like a tortilla. Everything was pretty good, but there was some kind of spice in the pancake thing that didn't taste good after a while, so I gave up on that and ate everything with the fork.
I ate pretty quickly, and had more than an hour to warm up before the show.
We had a really nice crowd, and my enthusiasm for playing returned. As you might guess, this was the best gig of the weekend. Louisville was pretty cool. The capacity of this place is supposedly 900, and we officially were about half full, but it felt like quite a few more than that. I'm not sure where the other 450 would have stood.
Our midwest horn section was once again on the gig with us, sounding good and going a little sharp on the crescendoes. It's been nice having them frequently with us--I don't even need to cue them anymore, and I think we've found all the mistakes in my charts.
And that's it! More travel this coming up, so check back in a week.
