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!

Beauty Pageant

Yacht Rock played a golf club mixer party at Druid Hills Country Club.  Great gig!  We did this one last year, and it was similarly awesome.  Lots of talent--good looks must be part of the membership application.

It was a fun crowd, and we had a good time with them.  As an added bonus, we had Kip on sound.

Mark Cobb brought a new drum kit--a Questlove Breakbeats kit (sixteen inch kick, one tom).  It provided much inspiration.

We're in Woodstock tonight for a free show!  Come see us!

Sazerac Session, Day 2

I met up with the one and only Greg Lee (and Wyatt) at Madison Studios for another Sazerac horn session.  Last time we'd done Southern Nights, Gonna Move, Fat Man in a Bathtub, All That You Dream, and It's a New Day.  Tonight's agenda was Give it What You Can, Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley, Sailing Shoes, and Hey Julia.  Not a bad way to spend an evening, eh?

We tackled Give it What You Can first.  Tough tune, somewhat because of my chart (which looked a little complicated when sight-reading), but mostly because of my difficulty with transposing the bari part from concert pitch.  Ouch.  Things got really bogged down.  I sucked real bad.  Perhaps I should have practiced these things before I tried to record them?  Hmm?  Getting all the parts down for this took two and a half hours.  Four horn parts (alto, tenor 1, tenor 2, bari) plus some of the alto up an octave.

From there, things accelerated.  Sneakin' Sally--easy.  Sailing Shoes--yep.  I finally got in a groove.

The last tune of the evening was Hey Julia.  We decided to replace the female vocal parts with a pair of clarinets.  Not a big deal, though I playing something up a whole step but down an octave on clarinet  requires some brain power.  As we began recording the second voice, all of the sudden my head exploded;  I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't remember what I was doing, what the transposition was, how to play.  Everything in my head was screaming AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!! and I somehow managed to play without directly thinking about anything--sort of the mental equivalent of "hold still for just a second."  Whew!  With that, the session was over.  Made it!

In the final one, we'll do any touch ups and add the solos (2 alto, 1 tenor).  No transposing!

Aquarium Live

I did a House Live gig at the Aquarium last night with Jeremy as DJ and Steven playing percussion.  Not a bad night!  Jeremy does a good job of looping sections to blow over, and then releasing them once I'm done.  It definitely makes for a more musical situation.  Steven played congas and an electronic pad--a good combination for what we were doing.

There's not much to say beyond that.  Looks like the Aqaurium has new handlers for the band guys.  They seem pretty cool.  We got a good laugh when they asked if we knew how to get back to the loading dock.  We said yes, thank you, but we're going out through the parking deck.  When the handlers explained that door was locked, and then we explained that we sneak out through the emergency exit (and the handlers didn't know what we were talking about), things got complicated.  So…yes, we know how to get out, probably better than you do.  Let's just leave it at that.

There was plenty of down time before the gig.  Here are some pictures.

Sunday Night

No Saturday night gig!  Bummer.  I spent the day at the pool;  Saturday night, I stopped by Bryan Lopes' house (also not working Saturday night!) and picked up my new soprano (the 62), which he fixed up for me.  Nice.  Always a great hang.  Lopes was breaking in a reed for his morning church gig.  Funny how a two minute exchange ("here's your horn/here's your money") becomes forty minutes of laughing.

The soprano plays great.  I did mess around with the position of the G key.  The left hand upper octave stuff on this horn is a little different--for one thing, the octave key closes a small tone hole above the usual C.  It brings the upper C# more in tune.  I thought that maybe I wasn't pressing the octave key down all the way sometimes, allowing the C# to go waaaaaaaaaaaaay sharp--like most of the way to D.  In fiddling with the horn and a tuner and paying attention to what my left hand was doing, I realized that touching the G key was allowing the secondary octave key to open a little bit (there's already a little movement when you push the octave key--gotta get Lopes to check that).  Opening the G octave pip sends the C# waaaaaaaaaaaaay sharp.  The solution is to maybe not rest my finger on that key at all (easier said than done), but I also bent the G key down closer to the body a little more so it's not right in the natural curve of my hand.

So…there may be some secondary horn work coming up after all the pads settle and I can get back over there to Lopes' house.  We'll see.  I played it some more Sunday night, and after getting a couple of good reeds happening, the horn is feeling really good.

Anyway…

I got shut out of my Sunday AM church gig.  I guess we all did--it was just a kid's choir with piano accompaniment.  Boo.

Sunday night, I was back on the job at my PM church gig.  Good to be back!  I did a lot of warming up on flute, so I felt good on both horns.  I might actually have a couple of days to play my horns before I have to learn something special for an upcoming Yacht Rock gig!

Purple Rain

Last night, Yacht Rock performed the album Purple Rain as part of our summer concert series.  This show was in a huge tent at the Promenade, up in the northern part of the park behind the Botanical Gardens.  I'd never been up there before;  I'd venture to guess that most park goers had no idea of its existence.  To get there, we had to enter at 10th Street and weave through all the curvy paths and past the power washer guy who was waving us the wrong way.

Anyway…the gig went fine, and it was packed.  The last I heard, there were 1,300 tickets pre sold.  I'm impressed that that many people found the tent.

Do you remember how it felt to take a really huge exam in college?  How ever you'd describe that feeling when you finish--relief?  satisfaction?--that's what finishing Purple Rain felt like.  I don't have much of a feeling for how I played.  I think I did fine, but there was almost no emotion attached to it.  At this point, I have pretty much no recollection of what I did.

The second set was regular Yacht Rock, and we cut loose a bit.

This was the debut of Cartoon Butterfly, another of our originals from our EP.  It's a really harmonically hip tune by Mark Bencuya.  I'm wondering if it's ever been publicly performed before.  With this tune and Lowdown, I ended up playing more flute than alto.

This is what it sounds like When Doves Cry.




Upcoming dates (with Yacht Rock unless otherwise noted):

June 8, Woodstock Summer Concert Series (Woodstock, GA)
June 13, Lincoln Theatre (Raleigh, NC)
June 14, NC Music Factory (Charlotte, NC)
June 15, Ziggy's (Winston-Salem, NC)
June 24, Sounds from the Underground--David Freeman Quartet (Atlanta, GA)
June 28, Park Tavern (Atlanta, GA)
June 29, Strand Theatre-Schooner Steely Dan show (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 16-17, Smith's Olde Bar--Please Pleaserock Me (Atlanta, GA)
August 23, Park Tavern (Atlanta)
September 27, Park Tavern (Atlanta)
October 19, Thriller at Variety Playhouse (Atlanta)
November 1, Music Farm (Charleston, SC)