Santa Fe! This was our third year playing this gig--some kind of private party at an expensive house on a hill, and every year it gets a little bigger, a little more expensive. This year, they built a boat deck, and we played up in front of the bridge. How clever is that!
The views are beautiful.
And the property is also gorgeous.
We arrived really early--flying west from Atlanta to Albuquerque, we landed at noon, ate lunch at the airport, and then piled into a sprinter van for the trip out to Santa Fe. After helping set up the backline gear and then sound checking, we still had several hours to kill. I went for a run (it was hot and there was altitude), and then we took the house shuttle into town to find food.
I hit the Indian place (of course), and they were so slow, they turned the lights on in the dining room when they seated me! I ordered dal makhani (lentils sautéed with onions, garlic, ginger, and tomatoes) and a side of rice. Pretty good.
Met up with everybody else for a stop at Starbuck's before the shuttle took us back to the gig.
Every year, we've had trouble with the weather, and this year was no exception. Rain passed by our hill on several occasions. When I went to check on the stage (and my stuff), the local guys had tarped everything except my saxophones, flute, piccolo, EWI, and laptop. Dudes! So, I put all my stuff back in the cases and made sure my computer stuff would stay dry.
We delayed the start by fifteen minutes to see if the rain would get us. It held off, though, and I unpacked my horns and we got to work.
This one was tough. It felt like we'd been hanging around all day (we had), and the crowd was pretty lukewarm in their response to us. An 8:30 PM start time felt like 11:30 to us.
At one point, a couple of really big moths (like 3 inch wingspan, bodies like your pinkie finger) came out of the desert to check us out. If there's such a thing as being attacked by moths, we were! I had one that landed on one leg, then moved to the keyboard (noo!), then moved to my other leg (NOOOO!), and I swear he was chewing on my pants, so I brushed him off, and he fell on the stage and played dead for a couple of songs. Eventually, he flipped over and just hung out there, then crawled up on the foot of the keyboard stand. Moth attack repelled!
We finished around 10:30 PM, packed up whatever was coming with us (mostly my saxophones and stuff), hopped in the sprinter van and headed back to our hotel in Albuquerque, an hour away. I was in bed at 12:30 AM, and up at 4:20 AM to catch the shuttle to the airport. Ouch.
Cool car in the airport.
I don't know if I took a nap this afternoon, but I somehow managed to get to my church gig. It's--amazing is not the ride word--maybe it's impressive? how much my physical chops are affected by hard days like this. I knew my brain would be tired and I'd make dumb mistakes reading charts, but my flute face took the whole rehearsal to come around to something sounding decent. Anyway, I made it through the actual service just fine.
