I played a GREAT gig last night! My jazz quartet was hired to provide a quartet for a corporate networking function at the Marriott Marquis downtown.
Tyrone Jackson is one of a kind. He is super awesome! One of my favorite keyboardists and one of my favorite people. Nadav Spiegelman is a younger guy on the scene. He has a beautiful bass sound and plays really melodic solos. Chris Burroughs has an incredible sense of time--he is constantly shifting gears and reacting to everything and everybody. Fantastic stuff!
I loaded up my gear in my truck for the trek to the 10 High last night, and the sky was grumbling. I thought maybe I'd be able to get away before it struck, so I jumped in and took off. By the time I got to I-75, the clouds were really dark and low, and most were poised just south of me. It looked like I was definitely going to have to go through it, but if I could go really fast, maybe I could get out from under it before my gear got wet.
Just south of Delk Road, the sky was creepy and dark. All of the sudden--POW!--a big piece of hail hit my windshield, then another, then another! Aghh!!! Before I knew it, I was in the middle of the most ferocious hailstorm I'd ever seen--and all my gear was getting pounded in the bed of my truck! The interstate was completely covered in ice, so much that you could no longer see the lanes. People were pulling over and slowing way down, while I tried to weave through them at sixty miles and hour, fishtailing madly on the ice. I needed an overpass to get under, but every one I came to was already packed with people waiting out the storm, so on I drove!
I stopped screaming long enough to look down and see that I was doing eighty.
I finally found an open overpass, so I pulled over. The bed of my truck had a bucket's worth of ice in it. As I grabbed the first cases and moved them into the cab, a car came flying up behind me. A guy jumped out and screamed "THAT WAS FUCKED UP!!!!!!!!"
In a few minutes, I had all my gear reconfigured, and the hail had switched to rain, so I headed out again. By the time I got south of West Paces Ferry, the rain had stopped, and it the ground was dry when I got into the city. Crazy weather!
Yacht Rock was at the 10 High again. We had a better crowd than the previous week, though it looked bad until just before we started. It definitely helps when the door guy isn't stealing money.
The first set was ok. I played pretty well. Monkey was having a bad night. We went on break, and I gave up. The second set, I busied myself by addingHot in Herre (an homage to Chuck Brown, and an attempt to piss Bencuya off) into every song, sometimes transposed and sometimes not, and almost always between songs. It actually sounds OK in the verses of Power of Love. When I had an organ sound dialed up, I tried the beginning of Bustin' Loose, but he ignored me. I wished I'd brought seven band aids. Dannells was drunk enough that he started singing along. No worries until he actually takes off all his clothes.
That was it. Another night of being subversive and annoying. No rain at load out.
Wayne Viar and I were back at Ventanas for a House Live gig this past Monday. It's been a while! This one was a four hour party, which meant that for sure there'd be at least an two hours of total bullshitting by us.
The gig wasn't too bad. Jeremy did a nice job of setting up little sections in which Wayne and I could play, and then when we would finish he would go into the track. I really we'd be in agony (four hours of this?!), but everything turned out fine.
This has nothing to do with the music, but they had these cool balloons that had controls, and you could steer them around the room. Many times, I was nearly attacked from above by a large, inflatable shark. Death from above!
I had two pretty good church gigs yesterday. The AM gig is coming together well--we've figured which voices in the horn charts we need to make the section sound good, and the leader is picking songs that work for us as a band. More importantly, we've added Phil Smith on drums! Super solid drummer. I've known Phil since the late nineties, when he was in love with Kenny Washington. Over the years, he's expanded his focus, and his pop/rock playing has strengthened immensely.
The PM gig was small but mighty, with just two vocalists. No problems, though. If Lopes ever gets around to repairing my soprano (which I gave him two weeks ago to fix), I might play it again on this gig.
In between, I did some less exciting stuff like finding guys for upcoming gigs. I checked in with a local guy I'd used before via text, and he hadn't bothered to save my number and had no idea who was asking. That kind of crushed my ego--I thought I'd played pretty well, but to him it was forgettable. It also reinforces my feeling that I'm completely off the local jazz scene. Bummer. It makes me think that the guys who do play with me are there for the check and not the music.
I also had a random guy ask me about sending him my transcription for Us and Them (Pink Floyd). Occasionally somebody asks after seeing me on YouTube…anyway, I told the guy that yes, I would send it to him. This week, he asked again, so I got out my handwritten chart and put it all into Finale so it would be nice and neat. The dude never sent me an email, so I ended up making a pdf of it, then saving the pdfs as jpegs, then emailing them to myself so I could save the jpegs on my phone, then texting the three pages to him. All that, and I heard nothing in reply. Thanks would have been nice…
The hell with that guy. Here's the chart. Send me an email and I'll send you pdfs if you'd prefer.
Yacht Rock had quite a long day Saturday. Nick and Dannells flew in from Indianapolis; the rest of us began our third day of gigging in a row. We played the Dunwoody Beer Festival for the fourth time. I think this is the first time the weather's been clear--usually we are huddled under a leaking tent.
Why anyone would want to stand in the parking lot of Perimeter Mall and drink beer in the middle of the day is beyond me. People turn out, though, and we gave them three sets of music (our first set was our Dazed and Confused stuff, so I only played on half the set). No problems. Still no crazy bass feedback, which makes me think The Hamilton owes me some kind of monetary apology. Get it together!
Anyway, we finished and it was still light out. Yay! I went home and unloaded all me gear, and then I started to get really tired. It was tough to turn around and head out to Smith's to play 500 Songs for Kids. We were given Strawberry Fields Forever. No sweat, right? We do a slammin' Beatles tribute! I think I got about eighty-five percent of my part (the trumpets thing, which I played on keyboard) correct, which sadly is one of my better attempts at 500 Songs. Usually, I suck real bad..remember November Rain? This time I only sucked on the first full chorus with brass (the third one if you're counting from the beginning…CHORUS, verse with flutes, CHORUS, verse with brass, CHORUS THAT SUCKED, verse with brass, CHORUS, tag, outro). Right notes, wrong spot. Booooooo!!!!! We backed up a friend on Imagine right after that (me on strings, which I miraculously did not screw up).
Following (my) tradition, I ran out the back door and went straight home, tired and brain dead. Why do these gigs take so much out of me these days? Gettin' old?
The Yacht Rock Revue played a snoozer of a gig last night. The audience was a bunch of lawyers. We were largely ignored (except for the half dozen wives who tried in vain to get the party going).
My big entertainment was trying to fit "the lick" into all of my solos.
The Yacht Rock Revue (with a couple of subs) was back at the 10 High after a few weeks away. It's still a dirty hole of a room. Load in through the back hallway, past the stagnant puddles of something(why there are puddles indoors is a mystery), past the dead roaches, over the rubber bar mats that are thrown in the way, and you're in, but then avoid the dead roach on the dance floor and the leaking pipe from the bathroom upstairs while you're setting up.
The crowd was thin. I'm guessing the crowd has moved on as we've moved on to bigger and better things. The head count was somewhere around sixty people on the night. Not very inspiring! We made the best of it, though, and generally played well. Oh well…at least there were fewer people to dodge while loading out.
Wednesday: The Yacht Rock Revue began our little northeast tour with a local gig at the Weather Channel, celebrating their thirtieth anniversary with a party. An unusual start, if for no other reason than I drove down to the office, loaded my gear in the trailer, and then drove most of the way back to my house for a gig. This one was 80s themed, since they began in 1982.
The gig was pretty easy. We backed the trailer up to the stage, unloaded, and set up. Good weather (predictably) made it all go well. We were on one end of a giant tent; food trucks were on the other; Jim Cantore in the middle. Cantore looks like a cop, by the way--a bit shorter than me, stockier, shirt sleeves rolled up--Detective Cantore. The food truck (Yumbii) was awesome, by the way, and I had two desserts from the King of Pops.
Detective Cantore in the lower left hand corner
After the gig, we packed up and drove up to Charlotte, NC, where we spent the night.
Thursday: We were up pretty early for the drive to Baltimore for our next gig. This one was a public/private event for Groove Commerce at a bar called Little Havana. Pretty cool setting--right on the inner harbor in a pretty good sized room. They loved us and we loved them. B is for Baltimore and B is for beautiful boobies. I saw many of them; exquisite scenery. Evidently, internet marketing is big with the babes.
The sound was good, the energy was great, and the views were mighty fine. Another good performance by us.
Here's a video:
Friday: We were able to sleep in because we only had to go to Washington DC for our next gig, so we left around 11 AM. The traffic in the city was incredibly bad, even mid day--it took us probably forty-five minutes to get parked once we got within sight of the venue.
We played a public gig at a super swank room called The Hamilton. It looked to me like a really upscale jazz club; their calendar lists everybody from Roy Hargrove to Toad the Wet Sprocket.
They had an underground loading dock where we could stash the van and go wander for a few hours.
Dannells led a few of us to a pretty good African restaurant called Peri Peri. Lots of dead chicken. I ate four bowls of frozen yogurt (it was all you can eat).
We still had an hour before load in, so we then went to the Spy Museum. Pretty groovy, with lots and lots of Cold War stuff. It had hidden listening devices, guns disguised as other things, things you can stick up your butt in the name of national security, and an air duct for Dannells and me to climb in.
The Hamilton was cool, the stage was nice, the backstage was super groovy. I had an hour to actually warm up for this gig, so I found a back hallway where I could zone out and play saxophone. Ahh…
The gig itself was OK. I figured out really quickly (as did everybody in the room) that there was some kind of low end thing happening to the right of Dannells, and whenever I would step forward to take a sax solo, it would feed back--a gig-destroying low frequency, high volume roar that the sound guys never could fix. If I stayed at my station, things were OK, but it kind of neutered my performance (on a night where we played Baker Street, Maneater, and Careless Whisper). I was really disappointed. Everyone seemed to have a theory, but nobody had a solution. Could it be that I when I walked out, I was right on top of the sub under the stage? The sound guy didn't think so. Whatever it was, they couldn't get it right.
Awesome light show, light guy.
Here's a video of us crushing Rosanna. The mix sounds really good! Early in the night, I turned my amp off for a while--I was so cranked in the house, I didn't need it!
Saturday: This was the toughest day of all. We spent the night at a crummy hotel in Maryland, then got up on four hours of sleep and drove to New York City for a pair of gigs.
Gig number one was a three set extravaganza on a pier in NYC (pier 83, I believe). We were on one end of what was really just the Circle Line's parking lot); Wrestlers were on the other end--a Nacho Libre situation. In the middle was the most pathetic excuse for a taco stand ever, manned by the Disgruntled Asshole Taco Servers Union. We changed on a boat with about thirty of the wrestlers, in a haze of body odor that nearly asphyxiated me. All of us has an El Guapo to face.
The whole thing felt really cheap. The stage was small, the taco thing sucked real bad, the wrestling thing was weird (congratulations to DJ Phat Pat for winning his match). If I didn't know any better, I would have sworn that he was one of Cobb's biggest fans (by weight), Terry.
We had a really good all female mariachi band open for us. Nice pants, ladies.
In spite of the surrounding BS, we played well. The sound was pretty good, though my sax mic picked up some interference and started cutting out (nobody told me until the gig was over, though).
When the Cinco del Cheapo was over, we packed up and let a crew of guys move our gear two piers over (pier 81?) to a boat for a booze cruise (ride around New York harbor, drink yourself stupid). The one we did last time seemed like a decent set up for music on a boat. This one, in contrast, looked like Yacht Rock hijacked a Circle Line Cruise. We jammed ourselves in a corner and set up.
This gig was pretty insane, like we were playing a basement frat party. No stage (and no room), so the crowd was right on top of us. I had some crazy girl who kept banging on the top notes of my keyboard. She also jumped in and screamed into Dannells' microphone a couple of times. The security guy was worthless, but I also think the crowd was so thick, he couldn't see what she was doing. The sound man couldn't see us either. Afterwards, he told me "When I was learning how to use this mixer last night, I was hoping to get a band like you guys." Yikes.
Hey Gina!
This gig went well. They loved us, and even with the strange set up, we hit another home run.
We loaded out and headed to our hotel. Greg almost got in a fight with a guy picking up laundry. The place had problems with the rooms, so we had to share beds. I flooded our entire bathroom by taking a shower. What a messy day!
Sunday: We left Nick and Dannells behind in the city and pointed the van towards home. The five of us took turns snoring.
Our return got as far as Gastonia, NC, where we spent the evening. Applebees. Yay.
Monday: The last few hours went by pretty quickly. Home again!
