David Freeman Music

I had a great time recording horns tonight at Madison Studios, adding horns to a New Orleans inspired project called Sazerac.  Led by Greg Lee, the rest of the band is Mark Cobb (drums), Mark Dannells (guitar), and Mark Bencuya (keyboards).  Great stuff! A few of the tunes had horns on the original recordings, but mostly these are my horn arrangements. For this session, I played alto, tenor, and baritone sax, and a little bit of clarinet.  Everything sounded and felt good horn-wise (clarinet felt ok--does it ever feel really good?).  Good reeds are everything. Four tunes in four hours is pretty good.  In a couple of weeks we'll go back in and record the four other, plus any solo stuff. I was working up my arrangements last week at home.  Here's a little practice solo:

The Marriott Marquis atrium After the late night at the Marriott Marquis and then Smith's Olde Bar, I went to bed around 3 AM.  Four and a half hours later, I was headed out the door again, this time off to my AM church gig.  Ugh. The gig turned out to be pretty good.  For one thing, they've scrapped the V-drums and returned to an acoustic kit.  I don't think anyone was on in ears, either.  Whatever the sum of all those little things was resulted in the band digging in a little more and playing more cohesively, and the results were much more satisfying.  I played saxophone on two songs (both with some solo room) and one on unamplified/inaudible flute (not Matt's fault).  I also played clarinet on the closer. We did two services…extra money!  though it did delay my nap. Sunday night, I was back at the Marriott Marquis in the same room in the same spot (probably on the same stage) for a House Live gig.  The one on Monday was pretty fu...

The gig train just keeps rolling.  Yacht Rock was at a corporate function last night.  Typical stuff--we've played this same gig two years previously, so I guess we were undeterred by the absence of any crowd response whatsoever until the last hour.  At the end, they were really into it.  And the mayor gave us a shout out, which is usually probably hopefully cool. A couple of other things… Jovita Moore is even better looking in person.  Wow. We loaded in at 4 (all seven us with all our gear), and were set on the stage by 4:40.  Then we waited as the sound guys did their stuff (miking things and running lines).  Waited…waited…waited…at 6:40 we finally had to bail on the first ten minutes of our soundcheck so we could eat and change and start playing at 7 PM.  Not cool.  Not impressive. Moontower! From this gig, we ran over to Smith's Olde Bar to close out Five Hundred Songs for Kids, performing James Brown's Sex Machine . ...

Yacht Rock played Turner Field last night.  It's always a cool gig playing in the plaza--a quick fifty minute set and then you get to pack up and watch the game in a suite.  Nice! Friday night games have fireworks, and we were also invited to play a short three or four song set on the field on a little stage.  We opted for songs that didn't require me to play keyboard (due to the space constraints), so all the songs turned out to be sax features.  Unfortunately for me, the rains came, so we ended up not playing.   I was almost famous. Oh well, still fun and easy, and the Braves won.  Cool gig! All of that was awesome.  You know what wasn't awesome?  Trying to drive away from the stadium.  Buullllllllshiiiiiiiiit.  You can't make me believe there is any kind of plan for funneling traffic away from Turner Field.  All the stop lights are turned off, random streets are blocked off, and cops are standing aro...

House Live had a nice little corporate background gig at the High last night.  Three hours of it is just about right--any more and I lose my mind. Since most of the gig is practice in a way (and whatever house music the DJ is supplying is the metronome), I used this gig to work on my flute articulation and the interval of a fourth in my saxophone improvisations.  Later on I also tried to play Take Five in different keys. So…nothing musically revolutionary, but a fun hang with Wayne and Jeff, and a pretty good night of playing.

Yacht Rock played a big show for the The Players Championship, which (in case you don't know) is a big PGA event (Tiger Woods won it this year).  We played a private party in a huge tent. The gig was good, but just a run of the mill corporate event.  Nothing particularly exciting to report, though the drink runners were mighty fine and load in was extremely easy (off the stage and through the flap).  Daniel Morrison subbed for Mark Cobb.  Even the sax mic feeding back seemed to work out OK--I noticed it most when we played Too Hot (in C), and the note coming through the PA was a C.  I guess if there's got to be feedback… Afterwards, Jim Furyk invited us to go hang out at his house!  How cool is that?  Everybody was pretty wiped out from a full day of travel (and we had another the next day), so we declined.  Still--how cool is that? The next day, Mark Dannells woke up with a terrible pain in his eyeball, which got progressively...

Congratulations to us!  We played our five hundredth corporate awards dinner last night, which earns us an honorary MBA from Juilliard.  Over the course of playing thirty-some-odd walk ups (really?), I got really comfortable with leveraging new growth, P and L forecasts, and the outlook for FY 14 (which looks great). Here's the fun part of the evening.  We had a great time playing together again. Unfortunately, our tour had to end.  Our next gig is Sounds from the Underground June 24 at Elliott Street Pub.  Come see us play a public gig!

In the midst of loading in for the Yacht Rock gig Saturday afternoon, I got a call for a last minute trio gig in Atlanta.  Two days later, we were set up in the corner of a hotel ballroom downtown, ready to provide music for eating.  The room was set up to look like a giant southern family meal under an oak tree, which launched us into a conversation about what percentage of southerners actually drink ice tea from mason jars. Easy stuff for us.  We played about a half hour, took a forty minute break, played about forty minutes, took a twenty-five minute awards break, and played about twenty-five minutes.  The gig ended an hour earlier than contracted.  Yes! It's always fun to play with Kevin and Tyrone, both of whom were outstanding.  We played a couple of new one tunes and a bunch of the usual stuff (mostly my tunes--who else is playing them?).  I lucked into playing a half hour of solo saxophone in the pre function area outside the ballroom be...

Yacht Rock played a couple of big shows this past weekend.  Friday night we played the Georgia Theatre in Athens, and the following evening found us in the Cannery Ballroom in Nashville.  Big crowds for both nights! Friday:  We haven't played the Georgia Theatre since last October.  It's good to be back!  Such a great room with a cool staff and a fantastic audience.  Not quite a sell out, but we came pretty close.  The last time we played was immediately following a UGA football win;  this one was at the end of finals week. This was a really fun gig for me.  I had a great time and played really well. I had good solos on LA Lindsay and Reminiscing (though my alto was out of tune).  We also played Baker Street , which is always a really fun feature for me.  In the second set, I finally got the Hip to Be Square solo correct!  It's about time.  I may need to tighten up my slap delay, though. This was our ...

I woke up at 7 AM Sunday morning, drank a cup of coffee, put on a suit, and left for work.  I hope I  never do this more often than once a week. I walked into my AM church gig to find it set up for the orchestra instead of the usual small group.  I wish I'd known I could have left three of four instruments at home!  Oh well…middle school level saxophone parts are easy on my brain first thing in the morning. While we were rehearsing, I got a text message from a friend who works as a pilot for Delta. My big excitement of the morning was when my tenor sax/T.C. baritone (treble clef) part was flipped over to reveal the B.C. baritone (bass clef) part.  That's an exciting transposition!  Change clefs and up a whole step!  I flipped it back over and went back to sleep. We lucked into playing both services this morning, so double the money!  Yay! In the afternoon, I somehow avoided taking a nap and instead ran errands and worked on stuff f...

Yacht Rock finished off the weekend with a slamming gig at the Atlanta Athletic Club last night.  I have no idea what we were celebrating, but it was a rocking party. We played this gig last year--we drove straight there from Nashville and set up on a stage in their tennis stadium.  Due to the weather, this year's event was in their indoor tennis facility.  Way better to me--no pollen, no rain, no direct sunlight. Awesome gig!  The sound guys were fantastic (Hi-Gain Audio), the crowd was into it from the first note, the load in/out was easy, and we played well.  Plus, we played I Keep Forgetting AND Whatever Gets You Through the Night !  Why can't they all be like this? We'll be back!

Yacht Rock played the Variety Playhouse last night.  Pretty good gig! The Yacht Rock Schooner played the opening set, and sounded great.  They did some new tunes ( You'll Never Find ) and some oldies ( Rosanna ).  A problem with the front of house interrupted their set (FOH couldn't get the band in the PA).  Once they got it up and running, it sounded really good. We played the Anchorman soundtrack again--previously, we'd learned it for a show at the Variety in January.  This time felt a little more uptight to me;  we might have played it better on this one, but I was kind of holding on like "I am NOT going to screw this up!" for the entire set.   It was good, but we were working at it. I played about twenty bars of saxophone the entire night--the solo over the verse in She's Gone .  I think my mic was audible on stage, but I don't thing it was on in the house.  Hmm.  Maybe it was, but it didn't feel like it. M...