Things are very slow right now in the local music biz, so I haven't much to report. A few livestream concerts have been broadcast--the Yacht Rock Valentine's Day Prom, and also the performance of Hot Dads in Tight Jeans, which you can watch on Facebook and YouTube.
The Prom was a pay-per-view thing, so I can't share the video, but here are some cool pictures from it:
Since then, my time has been focused on recording horns for another Ladies of Soul livestream, cranking out a couple of songs each day. Here's one:
Who's Loving You by the Jackson Five was going to be on the Ladies of Soul show, so I wrote a horn arrangement, and then it ended up getting cut from the setlist. My arrangement didn't really work anyway, so whatever--there's no place to breathe! On a real gig, I/we'd have died. At the very least, we would've needed a time out.
Anyway, I made a video out of it. My original plan had been to to just record the background horn parts and maybe I'd play bass notes on a keyboard just as a pitch reference, but then I thought I'd add a drum loop, except that I couldn't find what I was looking for, so I ended up playing the drum part and the bass part on a MIDI keyboard, and then I decided to add a keyboard part to make it sound a little more conventional, and hell, let's record a tambourine part kind of like the original song, and then if it's gone this far, I might as well play the melody, too. Waaaaaay more than I thought I'd do.
I do like the way the video turned out, though.
Here's a practice thing I recently discovered: one of the nice things about Instagram (for musicians) is that the clips tend to be a minute long, so if you hear something that you want to investigate, you're not going to have to wade into some twelve minute Coltrane solo to find the lick that caught your ear. I made screen recordings of things I liked, and then dumped the video into the app Transcribe, and wrote out what I heard. For example, here's a Ryan Devlin clip with a lot of modern ideas that I wanted a look at.
Here's another grab, this time of NYC saxophonist Sam Dillon demonstrating some outside playing (note: I think of each melodic idea as its own thing, so not necessarily something you would blaze through as one transcribed solo. I used solid bar lines to demarcate where I think you should breathe and regroup).
Also, here's a random Michael Breaker lick that I saw on the internet the other day and played a hundred times in a row.
See you in March?
