Fourth of July

Yacht Rock was fortunate to celebrate the Fourth of July with a gig--that week where we didn't have any gigs was tough on our bank accounts!  This show was an indoor event at a hotel in Buckhead, with two sets broken up by the fireworks show over Lenox Square Mall.  The crowd was on the small side (I think the days and days of rain made it tough), but the people who hired us were very cool, and the duck tacos were delicious!

So…we loaded into the room super early (1 PM), piled our gear in the corner, and split.  Dinner was at 6:30 PM.  I left for a few hours, and then came back and spent an hour in one of the hotel rooms.  That right there is pretty sweet.  6:30 was a small mishmash of food--go for the duck taco.  At 7:45 the opening band (Moontower) finished, and we did the ol' throw and go.  The results were not so great.  All my gear had to go to the far side of the stage, and with the multiple Napoleon Dynamites for stage hands, there was always someone standing either in my path or my destination.  One of my sax microphone transmitters would not turn on, so I troubleshot that as we were going.  Also, the stage was pretty small, and there were cables everywhere.  Who puts the snake for the PA in the downstage right corner?  How about a more central location?  It seemed like half the microphones on stage ran under my gear.

The first set was tough.  There was some unresolved feedback coming from the vocal microphones.  My sax mic (I switched my working pack back and forth between horns) also had a noisy moment when I turned sideways on stage.  We persevered.  The room was really hot--it felt like there was no air conditioning.

On the break, the sound guys ironed out the feedback issue (for the most part).  Also, my dead mic transmitter finally came back to life--I think it got damp coming home from the Park Tavern last week.  After a set where it sat out (and I stared at it--mental troubleshooting!), it came back from the dead.

Some lady came up to Bencuya on the break to tell him how much better he was than me, and how much more he contributed to the band.  She can go to hell.

The awesome dude taking care of us brought me more duck tacos.  I ate even though I was not hungry.

The second set was more tolerable.  Most of the crowd (surprisingly) hung with us after the fireworks.  Even though there was a band following us for the late night party, we still ended up doing an encore.  They were cool about it, though.

Special thanks to Ganesh for sitting in on drums.

We loaded out, put everything in the trailer for our big road trip, and that was it!  See you on the next one!

Upcoming gigs:

July 5:  Mercy Lounge (Nashville)
July 8:  Cape May Convention Center (Cape May, NJ)
July 10:  Brooklyn Bowl (New York City)
July 11:  Mohegan Sun (Montville, CT)
July 12:  Power Plant Live (Baltimore)
July 13:  Xfinity Live (Philadelphia)
July 14:  The Hamilton (Washington DC)
July 20:  Chastain Park Amphitheater (Atlanta)
July 26:  The Orange Peel (Asheville)

In other news, I saw some videos of us from Woodstock.  Turn the "saxaphone" up!

Sazerac Session, Day 3

Ouch.  I was up until 4:30 AM, suppressing my David Foster-induced gag reflex in order to get Bill Champlin's tunes on paper.  You're the Inspiration, Hard Habit to Break, Look Away…no thank you.  I liked Chicago better when they had a horn section (and balls).  I was up again at 8:30.

Rehearsal went pretty well.  The above mentioned sugar coated crap went fairly well.  We also reviewed stuff we'll need for next week's world tour of the northeast.  Elliot Lurie's Jimmy Loves MaryAnn bit me in the ass repeatedly.  Looks like I'll be playing that a few hundred times in the next couple of days. 

After lunch and a quickie shower, I was off to my third day of recording on the Sazerac project, Greg Lee and Co.'s New Orleans inspired band.  Today was solo day, and I played some stuff on Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley and Gonna Move.  Inspired by the original, we put two sax solos right on top of each other for Sneakin'.  The result is a cool effect--if I remember, it's takes one and three (or maybe three and four), and I'm using lots of the same ideas, so things get tossed back and forth randomly, but one part never acknowledges the other.  As I'm thinking about now, it was actually kind of Ornette sounding, which is always a plus.  Super damn cool.  I can't wait to hear that!

I made it home around 6:30 PM.  I was asleep at 7, and woke up at 10:45 AM the next day.

Playing Dead

So…some weirdness at the ol' AM church gig.  We did the usual opening of a couple of hymns jammed together.  That left two big songs in the book.  We played through the second, and after hearing the vibe of it, I decided to just play flute (mostly just grabbing the top part of the piano score).  For the first big song, the director brought a flutist from the choir to play…hmm.  My first choice for an instrument would've been flute, so I just kind of hung back and checked out what she was going to play to see if there was room left for me (there actually were some harmony lines to her flute part).  I got my clarinet out to try that at soundcheck.  Clarinet would be a nice blend with the flute.

We went upstairs to set up and soundcheck after rehearsal, and the flutist plopped her music on my stand and literally boxed me out of playing onstage.  Uhhh, now what?  I guess I wasn't meant to play on this one!  Kind of a weird situation--I played saxophone for the opening, walked off, she played flute, then went back to the choir and I played flute.

Anyway, this left me with significant down time during their performance, which I utilized by taking pictures of myself just off the side of the stage.

This happened for two services.  For the second service, I went upstairs and listened to everybody else. It sounds really good--nice work, Matt!  Difficult to stay whether or not my offstage clarinet part would have improved things.  I did get a nice picture of director, flute, and myself together.  I bet if I'd had a blue shirt, they'd have let me play.

After all the fun, I went home and worked on charting out Bill Champlin/Chicago songs for a Yacht Rock rehearsal.  My hatred of Chicago 17 returns twenty-nine years later!

The PM church gig was pretty decent.  I had a nice mix going (and no further complaints from the rhythm section), and my soprano playing was pretty good.  Flute was just OK.  It probably would've been better if I'd played it more in the morning.

After supper, it was back to the Champlin charting.  Up all night!

Steely Dan at The Strand

I was really jealous that the Yacht Rock Schooner got to play a Steely Dan tribute at The Strand in Marietta, a mere 10-15 minutes from my house, so it was really cool that I was invited to be in the horn section (playing bari sax).  Kudos to the band for doing such a good job, and particularly Jordan Shalhoup for dealing with the horn players (one of whom quit the gig during soundcheck!) and all the horn charts.  He also nailed all the sax solos.  Impressive work!

I really enjoyed being able to lay my bari in the case after the show and walk out the stage door.  I never get out that quickly!

Monkey on Fire

Yacht Rock played our monthly show at the Park Tavern last night to a nice sized crowd--not sold out or over-sold out, but a comfortable sized group.  For this one, we pulled out all of our stoner stuff, inspired by the movie Dazed and Confused.  It rocked a little more than usual, but the crowd still dug it.

Mark Dannells got his old amp (the Egnater!) back together for the first time in a long time, cleared some of the pedals off his pedalboard, and played the absolute hell out of our gig.  He was on fire the whole night--great solos throughout.  I think (same as any of us), that being able to hear your instrument clearly makes a huge difference in the way one plays.  If it doesn't sound right, it's going to be a tough gig.  Anyway, Monkeyboy was super awesome last night.  Long live the Egnater!

Other than that, it was business as usual on a muggy night in the tent.  See y'all at Chastain!

Fish Food

Long day yesterday…

I started with a Yacht Rock rehearsal for tonight's Dazed and Confused show.  It's a little outside of our normal batch of tunes--more stoner rock and less polyester.  Not too bad.  There are a couple of tunes where I have nothing to play.

From there, I loaded in to the Aquarium at 1 for a 2 PM rehearsal for a House Live gig.  It turned out that we really didn't need to be at the rehearsal (it was more for rehearsing the speeches and awards).  Mostly, I did this.

Somewhere in the middle, we squeezed in a thirty second line check, and then we left for pizza and beer.

A few hours later, Jeremy, Wayne, and I returned to play the show.  Two hours to go!  The room looked great.  A billion LEDs and other cool lighting effects lit up the ballroom.  We played thirty minutes, stopped for ten minutes, played ten minutes, stopped for twenty minutes, played thirty minutes, and then hung out for thirty minutes until we could pull our gear off the stage.  Pretty easy.  The only thing that was a drag was that the band was really spread out across the stage with no monitors, so we couldn't hear what the other two guys were playing.  Sometimes I could hear the beat from the DJ, but never the key, so random noodling prevailed.  I have no idea what Wayne was doing. I guess it was quiet enough in the room that it didn't matter that nothing we played gelled.

So be it!  I was home at 10 PM.

Sounds from the Underground

The David Freeman Quartet (with Tyrone Jackson, Kevin Smith, and Mark Raudabaugh) played a public jazz gig for the first time in a long time last night at Elliott Street Pub, part of a jazz series put on by Jacob Deaton called Sounds from the Underground.  It was super fun--the band went full throttle on every tune.  We managed to squeeze four tunes into our fifty minutes (or the other way around--we only got through four tunes in fifty minutes!).  Thanks to Jacob for sitting in on Guitar Song, and for Mark for accepting the gig at the last minute.

The band made $10.  That's pretty funny.  If you subtract the band (and their significant others) from the crowd, I think there were five people there.  Still, super fun, and everybody played their best!

Thrown Together

It's been a long week.  Here we are again at the Sunday church gigs post.

The AM church gig was really thrown together.  Our normal song leader/vocalist was in the hospital recovering from surgery, so the band leader went out front, which moved Dustin from guitar to piano.  Things were shuffled, to say the least.  More than instrumentation, everybody keys off the piano, and when the leading is coming from the guy twenty feet out front with his back to us, things are less concrete.

We got through everything, though.  Tommy Dodd was there on pedal steel, though I didn't hear him play much.  There wasn't really any room in the music for either one of us by the nature of the songs that were chosen.  I ended up playing lots of whole notes.

Bryan Lopes tweaked some things on my soprano to really get it in top condition.  Specifically, he strengthened the spring on the G key so that every time I touch it it doesn't open the second octave key vent.  Much better!  If you are a regular reader, you might recall that touching the G key when playing a high B or C# caused them to go a quarter step sharp.

My PM church gig was not too bad.  I played lots of soprano (still trying to get used to the new horn), still dialing in the intonation.  It's getting there.  I think it might be about time to record and see what the whole band sounds like.

NC Tour

Yacht Rock is home today after spending last weekend bouncing around North Carolina.  A pretty good weekend, I'd say, with heavy grooves laid down in Raleigh, Charlotte, and Winston-Salem.  The recap:

Thursday:  no Greg for the van ride up (he was already in North Carolina on vacation), so I packed the trailer.  Not too bad.  When we eventually reached our destination, everything was still where I'd left it, so I'll say that was a success.

We stopped for lunch at a place with decent food but crappy service.  When we tried to get our checks so we could get back on the road, the waitress actually accepted a phone call and proceeded to lean on the bar and talk to somebody for maybe six or seven minutes, with all of us standing there watching her.  Not impressive.  She's lucky that the gratuity was added into the bill.

As we got closer to Raleigh, a major storm closed in on us.  First it was to the side of the interstate, and then as the road turned, it was in our rear view mirror.  We tried to outrun it so we could load into the theatre before the rain, but we got caught in traffic.  Things were pretty tense there for a minute.  In the end, it passed us by, so load in was no problem.

Our show at the Lincoln Theatre was tough.  First, the rain and traffic made us almost an hour late for load in, which squeezed out any kind of rehearsal we could do at soundcheck.  Pete was on vacation for the entire week, so we had Greg in his place and Rob Henson on bass.  In the vocal harmonies, Greg stayed on his parts so Bencuya, Cobb, Dannells, and maybe me picked up Pete's vocals.  I sucked real bad at that.  I mean, I'd never tried to sing and play on a gig before so I had no coordination--most of my attempts ended up with me singing the string line or whatever I was playing on keyboard.  No good!

I guess I was sitting in kind of a bass trap on stage at the Lincoln--the drums and bass were really loud and I couldn't get comfortable.  There was a monitor for me, but I figured that blasting more stuff at my head was not the solution.  That and the wrong notes from trying to sing and play and then the wrong notes from me not being focused on what we were doing and the on stage sound quickly crushed my spirits.  Even when I went up front to play saxophone, I couldn't hear myself on stage or out in the house.  Boo.  I trudged through to the end.  Not my best work.

Due to the extreme weather, just over a hundred people were there to fitness my musical death.  Fortunately, Bencuya didn't record this.

I almost forgot…afterwards, we went out in search of food because we didn't get to eat before we played.  We ended up at the Five Star Restaurant, a cool looking Chinese place at the end of a block.  After parking out front, we went in and sat down.  At the bar was a presumed prostitute, two guys, and a couple on a landing above the bar making out.  Someone who worked there eventually came over--"Where'd you play tonight?" was the first thing he said.  We talked for a minute and he informed us that the kitchen had been closed for a few hours.  Since we'd stopped in, though, he asked us to do a shot with him.  Sure.  So there we are doing a shot of Makers Mark with him, and he decided to finish off the bottle.  It ended up being at least a cup of whiskey for each of us.  He then sent us on our way with a couple of suggestions for food.  It was totally surreal.

We ate at a place called The Raleigh Times.  Great food in the middle of the night.

Friday:  we moved on to Charlotte for a gig at the NC Music Factory.  It's a pretty cool place with restaurants and multiple music venues (there's a Fillmore at the same location).  Our stage was outside in the courtyard between a bar and a restaurant.  It looked like a loading dock with a tin roof covering us.  No ramp leading up to the stairs--only stairs.  Boo.

We ate lunch downtown.  Perfect weather.

Our show here was also kind of difficult.  There was plenty of room on stage and plenty of PA, but the stage and tin roof resonated with every low G that was played.  Songs like Peg and Rosanna were nightmares (both with lots of G's)--you could hear nothing but the low feedback that sounded like a tugboat horn.

It's too bad.  I played some of my best stuff in a long time, particularly on Takin' it to the Streets, but I think the sound became a huge distraction for the band.  I don't know if maybe it wasn't a problem out front, or the sound guy just couldn't solve the problem.

In fact, aside from the tugboat G thing, I was fine with the sound.  I could hear everything, and I could hear saxophone in the main PA.  I gotta admit, I love it when my horn is loud.  It's difficult to play when it feels like I'm playing into a pillow.

Singing-wise, we (and I) were much better.  Things came together much more than the night before.  I figured out which songs I could sing on and which ones were just too different from my hands.

During the second set, the smart light at the front of the stage caught fire.  Smoke poured out of it for half a song until one of the crew unplugged it and pulled it off the stage.  It was a nice diversion from GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!  Nice electrical fire smell.

I think there were maybe a thousand people there.  At the end of the night, we were standing around taking pictures with fans, and some guy pulled me aside.

NC Guy:  Tell me the truth.  Are you really playing the saxophone?

Me:  Yes.  (then, realizing this was a great opportunity to lie)  Wait, truthfully?  No.  It's just a really expensive prop.

NC Guy:  I thought so.

That's kind of a compliment, right?

Saturday:  Winston-Salem!  We played Ziggy's.  Rob and Monkey said that the old Ziggy's was rough venue, but the new place is really nice.  The room sounds good, the stage is big, the load in is easy, the sound guy is good.  We played to around a hundred people, but Ziggy's people dug it, so I think we'll be back.  They also have a Ziggy's opening in Delaware, so maybe we can hit that one too.

Another good night of playing.  The singing was better and the playing was better.  I didn't quite crush Takin' it to the Streets, but it was still good.  Nice gig.  I heard later that some bartender almost got his ass kicked by Greg and Mark Cobb.

Sunday:  the long drive home.  Our van is tired.  It needs some transmission work.

I made it to my PM church gig.  Pretty good mix, I would say, and for not playing soprano or flute all week, my face still worked well.  We had one singer, though.  Where is everybody?

Holy Dave

It used to be the norm, but lately it seems kind of unusual for me to play both of my church gigs.  I'm either out of town, got a better paying gig in town, or my (AM) church gig cancels on me.

My AM church gig was pretty easy.  A couple of hymns (with a "hackety-sax" transition), a chord sheet, and a big song with page turns every six measures.  Pretty easy stuff, though I never trust that what we do in rehearsal will work in front of the congregation (I'm talking about the aforementioned transition).  It really did, though.

Now that we're back to acoustic drums and a bass amp on stage, things sound and feel pretty good.  We're a band again!

Maybe it was the weather, or maybe I'm recovering from the weekend, but I crashed pretty hard once I got home.  Multiple hour nap.  Yes.

My PM church gig was ok.  I thought I had a pretty good mix going (mixing on headphones and checking without) with the vocals plenty out front, and it was questioned whether or not one of the singers was loud enough.  I also had a complaint (these are all from within the band, stationed in a corner of the church and away from the church speakers) that the piano was not loud enough.  The gain on the vocal was fine.  I turned up the entire mix and bumped the piano up and panned it to the band side of the room.  Too loud, I was told.  I set the volume back to where I'd begun the mass.  Everybody was happy for a minute.  At the end, I got a comment that the mix seemed muddy.  I give up.

The pianist and the guitarist tend to play the same thing at the same time (both doing an arpeggiated/finger picking accompaniment) on the same song, or both playing in the same register (and both playing bass notes).  To keep it from being a big mush, I panned the piano to the left (opposite) side of the church (since I assume that the sound of the acoustic piano is also contributing to the sound in the room, as well as being picked up by the vocal and drum mics, coming down the center and panned right, respectively).  I had the guitar panned right.  In my headphones, it works really well.  Piano and woodwinds in the left ear, vocals in the middle, guitar and drums on the right.  Somebody else wanna come mix for a while?  How about I stop and play my instruments for a little bit?

Oh yeah!  I play sax and flute sometimes when I'm not chasing the gain on the guitar!  My soprano is feeling good, and flute felt great--thanks.

Moving on!

I'm totally hooked on bassist Omer Avital.  His newest record, Suite of the East, is great, but the one I like best is Live at Smalls.  Totally awesome.  I found him by chasing down YouTube videos of one of my favorite sax players, Joel Frahm.  Check this one out (same band as Live at Smalls).  I'd kill to play in this group.

Woodstock

Wow!  Yacht Rock played an awesome show last night for the the City of Woodstock--part of their summer concert series.  Nice stage, good crew, good weather, and an amazing crowd!

Our first set was all BeeGees.  We'd played through all the newer tunes Friday night, so everybody knew what was happening on Saturday.  It also worked out well because all of those tunes are so groove oriented, the rhythm section got really locked in by the time we got to the yacht rock set.  All that stuff is fun, and harmonically much hipper than I would have guessed when I was a kid.

The second set was a big yacht rock feast.  Nice and easy!  Nick programmed a great set list--good pacing and a couple of less played favorites mixed in with our standard stuff.

Here are a couple of excerpts.  I post these as much to highlight Mark Cobb's phenomenal drumming as my own playing.



Man!  Those are really fun moments.  Soloing in a setting like that feels like there's electrical current flowing through me.

The crowd was estimated to be between seven and eight thousand.  Incredible!  Afterwards, we signed lots of autographs, which is a really bizarre thing.  I'm not going to get used to that.

All that, and I was home, gear put away, and showered by midnight!  Yes!

We're on the road next week with stops in Raleigh (Lincoln Theatre), Charlotte (NC Music Factory), and Ziggy's (Winston-Salem) next Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  Come see us!