Minority Report

I played a salsa gig last night…my last one ever?

I have mixed feelings about salsa gigs.  I get to play a lot, I like the music a lot, and it's not a wedding reception/micromanaged event, but it's kind of a rule that the circumstances surrounding the gig will be ridiculous.  This one proved to be no exception.

I have done five gigs with this band, and for every gig I have had to write charts for everything (with the exception of one tune that carried over from the first to the last).  It's usually about a dozen tunes, and I'd guess that I spend, on average, an hour per chart.  For this gig, I wrote ten charts.  Three songs were changed at rehearsal, so I wrote three more charts.  On the gig, the singer couldn't remember the words to a song, so we skipped that one.  So that's four charts (and four hours spent) that we didn't use.

our stage lighting was blinding

I showed up at 9:15 PM.  We did some kind of sound check.  It was a mixer and monitors tied into the house patch situation (we used the bar's main PA).  A Berringer mixer without enough inputs, so half the microphones used those low Z/high Z turnaround things into quarter inch inputs (with no gain control).  The piano and the bass ended up each stuck into one side of a stereo channel--I'm pretty sure that doesn't work.  A Peavey floor monitor and a Peavey Escort speaker on a tripod were the monitors. We had major high end feedback--at first it was out of control, but later on it only built up if we took too long between songs.

Then, the waiting began.  Where's the piano player?  (Donde esta el pianista?)  Ahh, he has a gig that ends at 10 PM, but he's five minutes away.  So…we waited.  Mentally, I drew a line--no piano by 11 PM and I'm leaving.  Fortunately, there was no audience, so nobody noticed us.  Waiting, waiting…who would show up first, the crowd or the piano?  At 10:45, he finally made it and got set up.  We began at  11 PM, playing for maybe ten people.

Things were OK.  In performance, the new tunes that I had charted didn't exactly follow the recordings (thanks a lot for that)--they were kind of bar band-ish, with hand cues and eye contact.  There was a big section in one tune that we skipped.  We skipped an entire tune because the singer couldn't remember the words.  We ended the set with a merengue where the vocalist missed his entrance, so we had to go around again and pick him up, and then once we got to the instrumental break, he wouldn't come back in, so we collectively just bullshitted parts over two chords.  I finally just stopped playing.  The rest of the rhythm section eventually faked an ending.

At the break, I still wanted to make a run for it.

The second set was short (thirty minutes) because we'd borrowed a tune for the first set.  More of the same…sloppy playing all the way around with a bad PA.  The crowd was still in the teens.  The gig ended, and I hustled out of there.  I guess on a good note, I kept my bag right next to me on stage, so packing up was easy…

davidfreemanmusic.net

Organ Trio!

I finally found an opportunity to do an organ trio gig with David Ellington!  We'd done a duo thing at a restaurant last December, and we talked about playing some more, but it just never seemed to come together.  I got a call about doing a jazz gig and then doing one of those House Live gigs with a DJ right after that, and they wanted to have the percussionist for House Live also play on the jazz part.  Sax, drums, and keyboard sounds like organ trio!  Yay!

So…here we are!  Ellington on organ, Phil Smith on drums, and me, trying to keep the Microsoft people happy by playing impossibly quiet in the acoustical nightmare that is the High Museum atrium.

 David Freeman Organ Trio-July 18, 2012 by David B Freeman

The House Live gig was easy…supposed to be two hours, but nobody showed up for the first half hour…thankfully, because I was not in the mood.  My alto mouthpiece played great, though!

davidfreemanmusic.net

Athens Recording

Yacht Rock was in Athens finishing up last week's recording project at David Barbe's studio.  Rewind!

Sunday:  I played my two church gigs.  The AM church gig had no horn section--just me.  It also featured a guest vocalist from Nashville.  I guess the music department is doing different things (weekly) while the main pastor is not around.  The previous week featured a bluegrass band (and therefore, none of us).  Anyway, this chick sang about half of her stuff to tracks, so we stood around a lot.

P.S.  Singing to tracks in front of people is karaoke, even in church.  Totally weird.

The PM gig was fine.  Lots of vocalists.  I was tossed a solo on a tune on which I had no intention of playing, and I played two really horrible wrong notes before I found the key.  It felt like F, but they were in F#.  Ouch.

Monday:  Big day at work!  My day to record for the new Yacht Rock song.  We first laid down the trombone parts (with a guest trombonist, though I did write the chart).  I think it turned out fine, but it was kind of weird because I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be the one coaching him through it.  On top of that, I didn't know the guy at all.  We got what we needed out of him, though.

Next up was my stuff.  Bass clarinet went by quickly--first complete take.  The flute stuff didn't take long.  The clarinet stuff was super awkward to play (in C#), and it took me some time--we had to bring things to a halt so I could practice the part, and then we still pieced it together a measure or two at a time.  That was pretty embarrassing.  Definitely something I should have prepared instead of trying to sight read (up a whole step) on the spot.  Way to go, dumb ass.

It sucks that my ears are good enough to hear the intonation problems after the fact, but not good enough to correct the intonation problems as they are occurring.  Listening to the flute/clarinet combination in the control room, things sounded wildly out of tune to me. Not good!  I stewed over that for the rest of the day.  It surprised me that nobody else mentioned it.

Tuesday:  Nick and I went back to Athens to add a soprano sax solo to the end of the song.  The second take was the keeper.  That's more like it!

Before we got into mixing, I asked Barbe to autotune the clarinet.  He took a look at the pitch, but it was just about right on.  Hmm…maybe it's the flutes?  He looked at that, and it was just about right on. I think I was worried for nothing about the pitch.  It must've been the timbre of the two together.

In other news…my Sakshama alto mouthpieces arrived in the mail!  Sweet!

Here are videos from last Saturday's quartet gig:



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Piedmont Park Quartet

I played a jazz quartet gig yesterday morning at the Green Market in Piedmont Park.  We made lots of fans--I gave away all my homemade DVDs and business cards.

The band was comprised of Louis Heriveaux on keyboard, Kevin Smith on bass, and Chris Burroughs on drums.  Everybody played pretty well, though 10 AM is really early to start a jazz gig.  I felt like I couldn't get anything going, and I tried to inspire the other guys to play more aggressively (which would hopefully get me going).  In some spots, it definitely sounds like we're at odds with each other--I'm going nuts and the band is really playing it cool.  In the second set, I think we got a little more together.  I always feel like I'm failing when the band doesn't read my playing as I think they would;  maybe I need to go with everybody else instead of trying to drag them in a different direction.

Here's audio:

 David Freeman Quartet-July 14, 2012 by David B Freeman

davidfreemanmusic.net

Odds and Ends

It's been a pretty low key week for me.  Here's a quick wrap up:

Sunday:  my AM church gig was cancelled, but I still had the PM gig.  It was pretty solid;  Beth sang with the group.  I had a good sax solo on one tune.

Tuesday:  I have a salsa gig coming up next week, and we had a rehearsal.  Usual stuff…I wrote out maybe fifteen tunes, only to show up and and find out that three of them we were no longer doing, but they chose three more, so now I've got to write three MORE charts.  At about an hour a chart, that's not cool.

Jose Manuel Garcia is playing piano for this gig.  I hadn't seen him in a long time.  He's a super nice guy and a terrific pianist.  Check out his website!  Good stuff.

We also have a really good bassist, using one of those Ampeg baby basses.  He really knew all the tunes well.  I was thankful that he kind of ran the rehearsal--no bullshit from that guy.

Thursday:  Yacht Rock rode out to Athens to do some work on our originals at Dave Barbe's Chase Park Transduction.

Two mixes from previous sessions were finished, and the rhythm section recorded their parts for the next tune.  I rode the futon for the whole day.  I also played some ping pong and took a nap.  My stuff happens next week.

Stay tuned!

davidfreemanmusic.net

Summer Tour, Part 2

Back on the road!

Wednesday:  the Yacht Rock Revue got up waaaaaaay early (for me) and flew to Baltimore to pick up our gear, all right where we left it.  From there, it was onward to Washington DC for our next gig.

The show in Washington was at Kastles Stadium, which is a tennis stadium right on the Potomac River.    It was broiling--really uncomfortably hot.  We shared the (thankfully covered) stage with an opening band, and neither they nor the audio company knew quite how to get their stuff together, so even though we were a little late getting there, we stood around and sweated for a while before things finally got moving.  Thinking about it now, I'm kind of surprised that one of us (in YRR) didn't get annoyed enough to start telling everybody else what they needed to be doing.

We waited in an air conditioned portable office.  Short on seating, but it beat standing in the heat.

The show was pretty lukewarm.  I don't think we played poorly--in fact, the playing part was a lot of fun--but the crowd was there for the all you can drink and the fireworks, and really didn't care that much about what we were doing.  The heat also crushed some of our enthusiasm.  We played for about an hour and a half and then the fireworks began (we had a fine view of the show in between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial).

On the way to our hotel, we listened to board tapes (CDs) from our show at the Canal Room in NYC last week and made some sound adjustments (and also had some good laughs at our mistakes).  I really liked hearing that--not just because it sounded good, but I could hear how different things were coming through the mix.  My organ playing is reaching the point of obnoxiousness.

Thursday:  up early again!  We drove all day to get from DC to Asheville, NC for our gig at The Orange Peel.  Cool!

This might have been the best room we played on this tour.  The Orange Peel is pretty legendary--when you tell people you're playing Asheville, they ask if you're playing at The Orange Peel.  We pulled up, and they had a crew of guys to haul our gear to the stage.  Hell yeah!  While they were bringing up gear, we had the opportunity to check out the Moog exhibit in the lobby.

After soundcheck, Andy Elliott from Elliott Guitars asked our guitar hero Mark Dannells to try one of his custom guitars.  A very cool experience, even though I was just a bystander.

The show was a lot of fun.  It's a big room with good sound.  We played some good shit in there, though I spaced out for a while mid-set.  I was watching some hippie girl watch me, and it dawned on me that I was supposed to be playing saxophone.

The audience was WAAAAY into the music.  Small in numbers (200 people?), but mighty in their enthusiasm.  We had crazy hippies, people dressed in YR clothing (one guy who I thought at first glance was Jim Ramsdell!), friends and family, and some guy who'd discovered us on YouTube and had been waiting a year to see us.  Neat!

In the middle of our set, our friend (and trumpet player for Please PleaseRock Me) Paul Poovey walked in with John Bryant (another IU guy)  and a couple of other guys!  A crew of wild brass players in town for JB's wedding.  Great to see familiar faces!

After the gig, the crew loaded our gear back out…rock star treatment!

P.S.  It was 77 degrees that evening when we went to eat supper.

Here are several YouTube clips from the show.

Friday:  an easy day, by comparison.  We got up and walked to brunch (where we once again ran into Poovey, JB, etc).  On the way back, we had several people in town ID us as Yacht Rock and congratulate us on last night's show!  Cool!  We'll be back!

brunch art by Mark Dannells

We headed to Nashville for a show at the Cannery Ballroom, sharing the bill with My So Called Band (90s tribute).

First stop was a quick tour of Zac Brown's new Southern Ground Studio.  Nice place.

We loaded in, soundchecked, and ate…usual stuff.

The Cannery was sold out.  Lots of people were jammed into that room.  We played pretty well.  Here's my solo from Good Thing:

 Good Thing Sax Solo by David B Freeman

You can buy the real thing here on iTunes.

Walter Eagan was gracious in joining us for a couple of songs.  He said it was like he was back in the seventies, but with hotter women.

We played his songs, beginning with Only the Lucky.  Before Magnet and Steel, he announced "Here's a song I wrote about Stevie Nicks."  We followed it with Go Your Own Way, also written about Stevie Nicks!

We loaded our own gear out.  Boo.

Saturday:  we boogied on back to Atlanta for a show at Riverside Park in Roswell.  I heard the estimate on the crowd was 3,000-3,500.  Nice!  It's good to be home.  People in the suburbs like us, too!

There was rain passing through about a half hour before the start, which probably kept some people away, but on the whole it was wildly successful.  We had another good show (though the sax mic had some feedback that the front of house guy never could solve).

Yay!  Another successful tour.  We're doing some recording in Athens, but otherwise it's a pretty slow week ahead.

davidfreemanmusic.net

Summer Tour, Part 1

Yacht Rock is in the middle of a pretty big (for us) east coast tour.  Here's what's happened so far:

Wednesday:  we left Atlanta and drove all damn day to Washington DC.  Lots of driving, napping, and talking.  We made a lunch stop somewhere in the Carolinas, which turned out to be great. Most of us hit a Whole Foods.  I bought twenty bucks worth of fruit and two slices of pizza.

We stopped in Richmond for supper at a place called Millie's Diner--super good food and cool people.  They had those at-the-table-jukebox-selector things.  Thelonious Monk was on there!  I played both--Monk's Dream and Trinkle Tinkle.

The band spent the night in the same crappy hotel that we had stayed in on a previous trip.  Our room smelled like they'd bombed it with five gallons of carpet cleaner.  Bad stuff.

Thursday:  one nice thing about staying at the same hotel is that we knew where to go for coffee.

More driving…eventually, we made it to the Lincoln Tunnel, where we encountered a ton of traffic.  For a minute, it seemed like the air conditioner in the van had had enough--no more cold air!  It came back to life once we started moving again.

First gig of the tour!  Canal Room in NYC.  We've played here before--good sound, bad electricity.

Our special guest for the first set was Robbie Dupree.  Yes!  We played Steal Away and Hot Rod Hearts with him.  Before the show, we all went next door for pizza.  How cool is that?  We hung out with Robbie Dupree.  It's kind of mind blowing that this sort of thing happens to me now.

He sounded exactly like Robbie Dupree, by the way, and he said we sounded exactly like the original recordings.  Very cool.

At soundcheck, I had one of those crazy moments where everything coming out of my horn was perfect--the sound was right on, it felt good, and every note was the right thing to play.  This happens maybe a couple of times a year, and it's sort of scary because it feels like I can do no wrong.  Magical stuff.  By the time we got through into the gig, it had started to fade a good bit, but at soundcheck I was the best sax player in NYC (which is saying something).  It was a freaky feeling.

We had a good crowd--I think a hundred and fifty people?--in the Canal Room.  Not bad!  I'd love to keep this as one of the places we play.

Towards the end of the night, the most amazing thing happened.  Some crazy drunk girl in yellow pajama pants jumped up on the stage in front of Dannells, and STAGE DOVE over his monitor!!! Holy shit!!!  At a Yacht Rock show? Fortunately, some guys caught her--she didn't hit the floor.

After the gig, I tried to congratulate her.  She asked if we were all wearing wigs.  Yes.  We're all bald.

Friday:  we got up and found some coffee.  Due to problems at the Canal Room Southampton (where we were supposed to play Friday night) our gig was cancelled, so we ended up with the day off in NYC.  Coolness.

I had previously ordered a couple of alto mouthpieces from a mouthpiece maker in Queens named Sakshama, and the day off afforded me the opportunity to pay him a visit and try some of his stuff.  How cool is that?

The trek from Chinatown to Jamaica Queens took about an hour and fifteen minutes.  Quite a haul!  I found the little house where he has a room.  He has a bed, a desk with a computer, and some bookshelves, and that's about it!

I tried his Dukoff copies first.  Both were very good.  Neither is made of the silverite--Sakshama makes his out of bronze.  I was really digging those.  The other mouthpiece I'd requested was a copy of a Guardala studio alto mouthpiece.  That model was not ready, but he let me play his real Guardala that he uses as his model.  Wow!  Two of these, please!  Awesome mouthpiece.

Once we'd dealt with the alto, I tried his copy of my tenor mouthpiece (a Guardala MBII).  His played at least as well as mine.  I took that one off my horn pretty quickly so I didn't fall in love!

Since the alto pieces weren't ready, I asked if he might be able to reface the mouthpiece I'm currently using (a Cheong Guardala copy).  He agreed to work while I waited.

Here's something dumb (maybe):  since I had a few hours to kill, I left both my alto and tenor at this guy's house and just walked away.  Stupid?  Maybe!  I couldn't believe I was doing it, but I did it.  I walked around Jamaica, talked to my mom on the phone, and ate Indian food.  Three hours later, he called, saying it was finished.  I tried it.  It's way better than it was.  Success!  He flattened the table (one of the main problems with it) and opened the tip.  It actually isn't very far off from his Guardala.

I made it back to the hotel a little after 10 PM.  Quite a day!  After a quick shower and change of clothes, I jumped in a cab and rocketed up to 44th and 8th Ave to see the Yellowjackets play at Birdland.  Super cool.

I think the Yellowjackets are really cool.  What they might lack in almost-out-of-control, firey playing (I guess I'm mostly talking about Mintzer), they make up with pretty amazing compositional skill.  The slick quality of their sound hides just how heavy their stuff is.  If you've ever seen a lead sheet for one of their tunes, you know right away how good the players really are.  Good stuff.

I lucked into a great seat at the end of the bar, which afforded me a great view of the stage, and also put me on the route from the stage to the dressing room.  Bob Mintzer shook hands with me after their set.  I'm golden!

Saturday:  Peter and I hit the coffee shop again before the van headed south.

We rolled into Baltimore pretty early.  Parts of the city were without power.  I walked around the little mall where we were playing (Rams Head Live) and came across a couple of street musicians.  This is (and you're going to have to trust me here) two guys playing You Are So Beautiful by Joe Cocker.   Good luck.

Rams Head Live is super cool!  It holds 2000+ people.  We had maybe 200, so that was kind of sad, but the stage was huge, the room was huge, and the sound was good (and the redhead was there).  I hope we can come back with a better crowd.  I bet the heat and the lack of power really squashed us.

We met lots of cool people who really enjoyed our show.  The end of the night featured a wild fistfight which ended with one guy in a puddle of his own blood and a massive cut over his eye.  The lesson?  Don't take photographs of another guy's wife.

Sunday:  we got up late, packed all our gear in a storage unit in Baltimore, and flew home.  Right around the time we hit baggage claim in Atlanta, I realized I'd left my keys in my gear in Baltimore.  Ugh.  Thankfully, my wife was able to help me out.  I went straight to my church gig, which went pretty well.  Good to see them again.  I played some really horrible stuff on the last song, but my mix of the sound was pretty good.

A couple of days to do laundry, and then we fly out again!  This is lots of fun!

davidfreemanmusic.net