Sazerac Session, Day 1

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:

Sundazed

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 fun, but this one was rough.  The main problem was that there was no monitor, so I heard nothing that was going through the PA except for the reflection off the wall across from us, and that was pretty quiet.  Mostly it was me noodling against two drummer/percussionists who were also noodling.  Boring as hell.  Paid well, though.

Strange to be on a four man (DJ, 2 percussionists, me) with TWO lighting guys.  The funny thing was that the client vetoed any light changes or movement, so both those guys set their lights and then sat there for three hours.

More Gigs

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.  I think we nailed it!  Unfortunately, there were probably fifty people in the room.  Ouch!  Hopefully they made some money.  We played I Wanna Be Your Lover as an encore;  the gig ended with a whimper.  At least it wasn't crowded backstage.

Almost Famous

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 around in the street waving their flashlights at the ground (which I think means "My toes are right here. Please don't drive over them.")  It took forty-five minutes, several apoplectic fits, and multiple figure-eights around The Ted and the capital before I finally found away to head north.

How long have the Braves played here?  And it's still a mess?  Has anyone ever proposed that instead of trying to manage the situation, we just let traffic operate normally?  Let the stop lights do their job, let the streets go in both directions, just like a regular day.  Maybe I won't have to make a u-turn at Fulton and Capital.  Maybe I won't have to merge around a random police car stopped in the middle of the street.  Maybe y'all are doing more harm than good?  The outcome couldn't be worse than what I saw last night.

Anyway…

Tonight we will be at 500 Songs for Kids (at Smith's Olde Bar) following a private gig.  Next week we'll be on the road:  House of Blues in Chicago on Thursday and Radio Radio in Indianapolis on Friday (then a private gig Saturday and the Indy 500 on Sunday!).

May 23, House of Blues (Chicago, IL)
May 24, Radio Radio (Indianapolis, IN)
May 31, Purple Rain at Park Tavern (Atlanta)
June 8, Park at City Center (Woodstock, GA)
June 13, Lincoln Theatre (Raleigh, NC)
June 14, NC Music Factory (Charlotte, NC)
June 15, Ziggy's (Winston-Salem, NC)
June 28, Park Tavern (Atlanta)
June 29, Yacht Rock Schooner Steely Dan Tribute @ The Strand (Marietta, GA)
July 8 Cape May Convention Hall (Cape May, NJ)
July 10 Brooklyn Bowl (New York City)
July 11 Mohegan Sun (Connecticut)
July 12, Power Plant Live! (Baltimore, MD)
July 13, XFinity Live!  Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA)
July 14, The Hamilton (Washington DC)
July 20, Yacht Rock Revival at Chastain! (Atlanta)
July 26, Orange Peel (Asheville, NC)
August 23, Park Tavern (Atlanta)
September 27, Park Tavern (Atlanta)
October 19, Thriller at Variety Playhouse (Atlanta)
November 1, Music Farm (Charleston, SC)

House Live

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.

Hello Jacksonville!

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 worse throughout the trip home (like icepick in the eyeball kind of pain).  It turns out he has a corneal abrasion.  Ouch!  We tried to find a clinic in Tifton, GA that could treat him, but nothing was open.

He'll be back to normal in about a week.

My Sunday evening church gig was not too bad.  In spite of not warming up, I played pretty well.  It's a miracle!

Trio Tour, Day 2

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!