Newport

Yacht Rock played a corporate gig in Newport, RI, Monday night.  Tough trip!  We had an early flight  up and a two flights with a layover on the way back.  

Lots of cool musical things have happened here because of the Newport Jazz Festival.  This gig would not be one of them!

Monday:  Up at 5:30 to meet Nick and Bencuya at 6:40 so we can be at the airport at 7 so we can fly at 9.  Bencuya (my sax mule) and I boarded the plane and found our seats waaaaaaaaaaaay in the back.  Mine was right next to the engine.  Didn't the plane that cartwheeled in Iowa City throw a turbine blade, severing the hydraulic lines?  I had the thought that this one could throw a turbine blade and get me...and then I fell asleep.  My paranoia was conquered by extreme fatigue.

I woke up as we were making our way into Providence.  Sort of like Boston, you fly in from the ocean, and the winds from the bay made for a really bouncy decent.  Not much fun--it definitely felt like a controlled crash.

After an airport lunch, we found our ride (one of those limousine buses), loaded our gear and suitcases, and headed towards Newport.

The view from my room.  I could've gone for a walk out there, but I took a nap.

All set on a small stage in a gorgeous room right on the bay!

So...this gig was almost strictly background--kind of a corporate dinner/reception thing--not a wild party.  Three sets of trying to keep the volume and intensity low.  I think they liked it, though!  Everybody was really cool to us.  Easy, low pressure gig.

My room for the evening:

Tuesday:  we had a 7:45 AM lobby call for our trip back to Atlanta.  The limo took us back to Providence.  The first flight was to Baltimore, where we had a one hour layover.  The second flight took us back to Atlanta. I slept on most of both flights.

 I finally got home at 5:15 PM.  Long day.

Sazerac

Sazerac...an idea launched in the Yacht Rock van of learning and playing a set of New Orleans inspired music, including Little Feat, The Meters, The Band, and Doctor John.  We have gone as far as actually recording an album's worth of music (still unreleased!), and around once a year, we actually do a gig.  2016's occasion was a show at Venkman's, opening for Moontower.

This has been one of my favorite projects--I did the horn arrangements for the recorded stuff, and also wrote arrangements for the live performances.  This year's section included Rob Opitz (trumpet) and Gary Paulo (bari sax), with me on tenor sax and clarinet.  The rest of the band:  Greg Lee (bass/vocals), Mark Dannells (guitar), Benji Shanks (guitar), Mark Bencuya (keyboard/vocals), Ganesh Giri Jaya (percussion/vocals), and Mark Cobb (drums).

The lack of space on stage left the horn section sprinkled in among the other instruments--it was the best we could do, sort of wrapped around the side of the drum set.  From my position at the front of the line I could hear the other two ok, but I think Gary suffered from almost being on the steps off the stage!  That also meant we had no monitor, so who knows what happened!

Anyway, I had a good time and a good night.  Every year, I chip away at getting my arrangements cleaner, and I saw a couple of things that I'll try and clear up for the next one.  Except for a few flubs, I was pretty accurate, and my solos were good (for a change).  See y'all next year!

GLee and Hop

Friday night was a double bill at Venkman's--Greg Lee and the John Driskell Hopkins.  I was part of Greg's set, which was about half second keyboards and half saxophones.  His band was Ben Holst on bass, the three Marks (Cobb, Bencuya, and Dannells), and me.

I enjoyed the challenge of playing some different music.  Even though I'd played with Greg at Eddie's Attic, I'd never covered the keyboard parts, so I spent a pretty good chunk of time during the week trying to get it in my head.   For the most part, I think everything went well.  Somehow we all managed to cram ourselves onto the stage at Venkman's (with two large bands on the same night, it would have been a little easier if we could've been on the expanded stage).  I ended up between a guitar cabinet and the drums, with just enough space to stand up and re-angle my vocal microphone for sax solos.

If you don't have your copy of the Greg Lee EP, you should get it here:  http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/greglee3

Charlotte's Washout

Yacht Rock headed north to Charlotte, NC Saturday morning for a show at the Oysterfest.  We arrived and loaded in just as the rain began.  It stopped long enough for us to drag gear to the outdoor stage, set up, and soundcheck.  

Unfortunately, the showers returned off and on up til and during the beginning of our first set.

I have no explanation for this.  It didn't work, by the way.

 It seemed like the weather was going to hold off, and by the end of the first set, we had a pretty decent crowd.  The forecast that I looked at said that the rain chance of rain was only about 50% until 9 PM.  Great...rainy load out.

Unfortunately, we didn't make it that far.  On the break, the rain picked back up, and at one point it got pretty heavy.  I hopped back on stage to check on everything (translation: I was tired of talking to people).  Bad news.  The rain had come through the corner where Zach and Kip had set their mixer.  Their electronics were wet and thus they'd been forced to shut everything down, ending the gig.  In the process of collecting microphones, they'd discovered that my gear (in the opposite corner) had also been blasted with rain.  My saxophones, flute, and piccolo were dripping with water.  There was an inch deep puddle in front of my keyboards.  Not good.

It was a very bad state of affairs.  If the pads on each instrument were soaked, they'd all have to be replaced (at around $200-250 per instrument)--a pretty grim feeling as I poured water out of one horn.  I did my best to dry each one inside and out, put them away, and hoped for the best.

My keyboards were relatively dry, and Zach had grabbed my EWI and laptop and moved them first, so they were ok.

That ended my night.

We loaded out in a steady rain, but the trailer was packed up by 10 PM, so we decided to head home instead of spending the night.  Back in Atlanta at 2:30 AM, home around 3:15 AM, all the gear unpacked and spread around my dining room table and floor by 4 AM.

Sunday, I checked out a few of my electronic things (laptop, effects pedal, Nord keyboard), and everything seemed fine.  I checked the piccolo and flute, and they seemed fine.  The tenor had a two leaks in the middle of the horn (A and F), which I doubt had anything to do with the rain.  The alto had a leak at the low C# and that pad had a big stain on it like it'd been saturated with water, so I'm guessing that's the extent of my rain damage.  

Zach's mixer had some more serious issues and will need to return to the manufacturer for repairs.

Purple Rain

The annual Yacht Rock presentation of Prince's Purple Rain is one of my favorite shows that we do.  The music is fun and weird and we do a good job with it.  This year's show exploded with the news that Prince had died; approximately half of the 1,000 tickets sold following his passing.  The Park Tavern (who hosts the show) then released an additional 2,000 tickets, all of which eventually sold out.  That's a lot of people packed under one tent!

Overall, I think we played a great gig.  We did have a technical issue with the click track and out off (used on a couple of the Purple Rain songs) being audible in the PA, but no one outside of the band seemed to recognize it, so maybe it wasn't as big a deal as we thought at the time.  My feeling is that with the 3,000 people talking and singing a cheering (and drinking), no one paid any attention to it, and once the song began, the click probably blended into everything else that was coming through the speakers.

That was the worst of it;  the good moments from the gig far outweigh that.  Highlights included guest vocalist 'Slick' Barnes' joyous performance of Boogie on Reggae Woman, the crowd's reaction to Let's Dance, the mother/daughter duet by Keisha and Courtney Jackson on I Feel for You, and the incredible energy from the crowd during the encore of 1999.

our man Peter Olson laying down some sweet keyboard sounds on The Beautiful Ones

ART!

Mojo Dojo

Wednesday night was another installment of Scott Glazer's Mojo Dojo at Blind Willie's.  Scott's put together music (mostly blues, 60s soul, and some other offbeat stuff) for two horns and rhythm section.  David Ellington has been the keyboardist as of late, joined by Nick Johnson on guitar.  The drummer's chair seems to rotate between several players, and the horns (trumpet and tenor sax) are usually Mace Hibbard and either Melvin Jones or Russell Gunn.  This month, however, Justin Powell and I were the horns, and Jon Chalden on drums.

It's a fun gig and a great hang!  Tyrone Jackson sat in on organ for a few songs in each set and blew us away.  Actually, pretty much everybody blew me away--I lost the onstage battle of volume and chops.  They go hand in hand for me--if I have to begin my solo at 85% intensity because of the onstage volume, it severely narrows my range of musical ideas.  Still, it was fun to be on stage with all of these guys, doing something completely different.  I'd love to have another shot at it!

One More

One more little private party for the weekend...Yacht Rock played an afternoon birthday party (I think--it may have been some other kind of party) at a restaurant in Buckhead.  If you were around Atlanta ten or fifteen years ago, there used to be a cluster of bars right in this area, but developers bought all of the property and made it a high end, Rodeo Drive sort of thing.  Ferraris and Aston Martins were parked outside.

Anyway, this one was a major throw and go.  We had all of our gear piled up at the back door, and on Kip's signal, we rushed in and set up.  I don't even remember if we sound checked.  Kip used one speaker as the PA.

We had Ganesh filling on drums today.  Excellent job.  Also, Zach was off doing something else all weekend, so we had Alan Smith assisting Kip with the audio for this handful of gigs.  Also excellent.

The party turned out to be thankfully very painless, a two hour gig with probably twenty-five minutes of speeches in the middle.  The crowd was not especially impressed with the fact that we were there (most of them were around the corner at the bar), but we did attract a few dancers (and, of course, some lady who requested Brown Eyed Girl, which almost ruined Mark Dannells' afternoon).  It was a perfectly low key event, and Monkeyboy punctuated it by sitting down for a song.

We finished at 6 PM, when the party had to turn the space back over to the restaurant.  We frantically pushed all of our gear out the back door and boogied out of there.  I kind of liked heading for home while the sun was still up.

It would have been a relaxing evening, but our annual Purple Rain show is this coming weekend, so there was much learning and reviewing.  Unfortunately, that kept me up all night.  If we can make it to next Monday, everything will be alright.

AAC

Yacht Rock played the annual spring party at the Atlanta Athletic Club Saturday night.  Not as many aggressive housewives as in years past--they turned out to be a pretty well behaved bunch.  Easy gig with no problems, and I was home around 12:30 AM.  Not too shabby.

I did a better job on Young Americans tonight--I've pretty much solidified the intro and the solo (the only parts I'm concerned with playing accurately--the rest is improvised).  One more night and I think I'll have it comfortably committed to memory.

Not So Young

Yacht Rock played a surprise birthday party in Buckhead last night.  Maybe 50 people in attendance, almost all in costumes.  I'd guess that it was a 70s themed party, but some chose the 60s by accident--ironic because everyone in attendance was old enough to recall what the 70s looked like.  Regardless, there was plenty for the eye to see.  Special shout out to Princess Leia in the New Hope outfit with the big hair buns and everything.  I admire your effort.

We added David Bowie's Young Americans to the set this weekend.  I thought I'd be really excited to play this song since it's 70s David Sanborn soloing over the entire song (hell, the entire record!), but it felt really long.  Maybe it's because the solo vocabulary is pretty rigidly a major pentatonic scale (with the occasional flatted third and flatted seventh).  Anyway, here's my chart.  The intro is important enough that subsequent Bowie tours used what Sanborn played as their intro.  The solo before the bridge is the only other spot where he gets pushed up in the mix and you focus on what he's doing.  Everything is just major pentatonic whatever.

I had to keep reminding myself to leave less space and play over the vocals and not care.

This is also entertaining.  I guess the microphone distortion on the sax is no big deal, or part of the appeal?

Encore

We (Yacht Rock) gave an encore performance of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon last night at Venkman's.  After that, we played a couple of Beatles songs, a couple of Zeppelin songs, and a couple of The Who songs (I wasn't involved in either the Zepp or Who).  I only play on about half of Dark Side, so it made for a short night for me, which was just fine after an usually long soundcheck and an eternity sitting in traffic in between checking and the gig.  Home by 11:30 PM, and that's only because I had to wait for the show to end so that I could collect my keyboard from the stage.

Nashville + Indy

On the road again!  Yacht Rock made stops in Nashville and Indianapolis last weekend.  Dig it:

Thursday:  We hadn't made it far up I-75 before we stopped for gas.  When we did, we discovered that the cap on one of the trailer axles had come off, exposing the bearings to the world.  This has happened to us before, and it's not pretty.  All of the grease is spun out and the bearings burn up.  Very fortunately for us, we happened to be at an exit with a truck/trailer repair place, who sent us up to the next exit to another trailer repair place.  The new cap cost us $5.   Back to my nap.

We arrived at the City Winery in Nashville a little bit late (which caused us to miss our field trip to the RCA A Room, a legendary recording studio which would have been really cool to check out).  Too bad.  More importantly, we had to deal with the trailer of gear.  By this photo, I would say it was not my best packing job of the suitcases.

Pretty easy load in.  We were set up in a decent amount of time.  I also had enough time after soundcheck to thoroughly warm up.  Maybe it's a coincidence, but I had a much better time on saxes and flutes tonight.

I guess City Winery gives you commemorative bottles of wine when you play their room.  Nifty.

So...City Winery.  The load in is painless, the on stage sound is good, and the green room is nice, but the layout of the room is very weird.  The room fans out in an arc from the stage, and directly in front are tables that line up like spokes on a wheel.  Halfway back, they put up a barrier/fence, and behind that is standing room.  The seated people tend to be very reserved and the standing room people go nuts, so from the stage you can hear the roar of the crowd, but can't see where it's coming from.  The last time we played here, they didn't put up the fence halfway, and as the night progressed, standing room people made their way down between the tables.  Mayhem!  I understand that the table people are worth more money to the venue (they buy more food and drink), but I wish there was a way to give the standing room people access to the stage.

The setlist, with a little love for our Nashville friend Scott Sheriff.

Friday:  We stopped for gas somewhere in Kentucky, and a dude who may have just been a dude, or may have been the local distributor, gave us a two six packs of local ale.  All based off of his conversation with a few of us while waiting to pee.

We crossed into Indiana right around noon.

Lunch was Mexican food at some hole in the wall place.  Very good!  My only complaint would be their posters advertising dessert.  There's no desert in southern Indiana.

Controversy of the day:  we left at 10 AM instead of the original 9 AM, opting to sleep more and show up less early.  We made it to the back door of the The Vogue in Indianapolis a half hour late.  Oops.  By the time we'd dragged our gear in and set everything up, we were right up against the time to open the doors to the public.

Friday (today) was at one point a gig in either Cincinnati or Louisville, but we couldn't find a suitable venue, so then it was going to be a day off in Nashville or Indy.  Two weeks ago, we settled on playing a night of Beatles in Indy at The Vogue.   Sweet.

I did my big warm up again before the gig.

Pre-gig, The Great Bencuya and I walked around the corner to the Cuban place for sandwiches.  Though I'd eaten a ton of food at lunch, I was concerned that by midnight, I'd be falling apart with no good options available.  This hit the spot.

Kip joined us, demonstrating how to eat without wasting any energy holding the sandwich.

This show was not particularly well attended (less than two hundred), but I was relieved to be playing tonight instead of sitting in a hotel room or running around wasting money somewhere trying to pass the time.  The Beatles show is almost as much fun to play as Yacht Rock.    Plus, no loading in gear tomorrow (or loading out tonight!).

The Indiana guys (Nick, Pete, and Cobb) all spent the night with their parents, so the rest of us headed to the hotel after the show.  I'm glad that I ate the Cuban sandwich so that the vending machine wouldn't be responsible for providing dinner.

Saturday:  We slept late and killed time until our 3:30 PM lobby call.  The Weinermobile was parked at the hotel next to ours.

On our way to The Vogue we passed a Yat's (a chain of New Orleans style restaurants in Indiana that I love, even though the one in Columbus uses instant rice, which is gross and shameful), and the Jazz Kitchen, one of Indy's jazz clubs.  When I was in college, a carload of us drove up from Bloomington to see Chris Potter right as he was starting to become famous.  I remember he was playing on #4 or #5 reeds (he said it hurt for weeks before he got used to it), and we cornered him after the show to ask him music school student questions.

Another nifty tidbit that I hadn't noticed at the time:  Mark Buselli was playing that night--his name is on the poster right above the SUV windshield.  Mark was a grad student when I was an underclassman.  My college roommate could do a hysterical impression of him, and the thought of it still makes me smile twenty years later.

More alcohol with our names on it?  Reports from the more experienced beer drinkers said that this was pretty bitter.  I think Zach (our excellent monitor guy) ended up drinking most of it.

The Vogue is great, but if they could figure out how to make the dressing room big enough to accommodate more than one person, it'd really help.  Fortunately, the weather was nice enough that we could hang out by the stage door before the show.  We have the same conversation every time we're here--"How does [whatever famous band] handle this shitty green room?"  We're guessing they use their touring vehicle as the green room.  It's a bit like loading into Smith's Olde Bar in Atlanta.  Every time you drag your gear up those rickety back stairs, you wonder why the venue has never done anything to improve what is otherwise a great gig experience.

This show sold out--in fact, it sold out a while ago.  The first set was a private benefit, and then they opened the doors to the general public.

It was a very long night, but very cool to play for a thousand people crammed into the room.  Indy loves us, and vice versa.  We'll be back soon!

Sunday:  7 AM shuttle to the airport for our flight back to Atlanta.  Getting up that early wrecked me.  Better than spending the day riding home in the van, though.