David Freeman Music

The 80s live! I played saxophone on an song that sounded like a Wham rhythm track today.  Much fun was had, and the hang was great, too.  I'll take one of these any day of the week.

Unfortunately, I ended up with no Saturday night gig. Sunday, I was up for my AM church gig.  There were no big surprises this week;  we did play some crazy seventeen page song with a million chords and three or four modulations.  Sightread that! So long to our buddy Matt Sheren, who has been running sound for us ever since I began playing here. He's off to bigger and better things.  I hope the next guy is as funny and talented as Matt! When the gig ended, I had enough time to race home, change clothes, and run out the door again to meet up with the Yacht Rock guys for an out of town gig.  Under our more catch-all wedding band moniker "Constantly Awesome," we played a wedding reception in Highlands, NC. It was a really nice gig in a beautiful room.  We left the doors immediately behind the stage open and enjoyed the really pleasant weather up in the mountains.  Everything sounded good (using our very basic PA). The first set focused o...

Yacht Rock was back at the Park Tavern last night for our monthly show there.  Not much to report…a good sized audience, though not overly crowded. We added a couple of new tunes:   Band on the Run (which technically we added last week, but I just started playing the keyboard part this weekend) and Running on Empty (which technically has nothing for me to play).  The former is much more interesting for me to play now that I have a greater role in the music.  To the latter, I added some organ to kind of fill it out--the live recordings I looked at had one keyboardist but two guitars.  We have one guitar and two keyboardists (well, one and a half, let's say) so I'm providing an anonymous layer of harmony and volume. The gig began with Band on the Run , and the rest was kind of downhill.  I'd practiced that song a bunch, so I was confident and played well.  Everything else (other than Running on Empty , which I'd also played a lot during the...

Sunday was a long day, with a Yacht Rock gig sandwiched by two church gigs. AM church gig:  not too bad.  When we'd gone over one of the two big songs for the day, the main vocalist hadn't been in the room, so I played the melody as a place keeper.  During the actual service, it dawned on me (right around the time nobody was singing and the bandleader whipped his head around to see why I wasn't playing) that there would also be no vocalist!  Yikes.  So, I was in.  No problem.  Four bars into the verse, I tried to turn the page, but six or seven pages turned instead.  Uh oh.  I tried again, but no luck.  I ended up playing the entire thing from memory, which definitely got the adrenaline going. I checked with the rest of the band afterwards, and nobody knew it was going to be an instrumental, which means I didn't miss anything at rehearsal.  Sometimes I don't pay attention... After my gig, I had around forty minutes to get h...

Please Pleaserock Me (Yacht Rock plays the Beatles) had a two night stand at Smith's Olde Bar.  Great gigs!  Also considering how much gear we have on stage for this show, it was nice to leave it all set up overnight (I did not leave my horns there, however).  The Friday crowd was decent;  Saturday's crowd was pretty full. Friday: Canadian Tuxedo night (head to toe denim). When I'm 64 went well, and I appreciated the reaction from the crowd, especially the guy who yelled "Goddamnit Dave!"  In spite of barely playing any clarinet these days, my sound and pitch felt good. Lady Madonna is, I think, the only Beatles song with a sax solo (played by London's own Ronnie Scott).  It's funny to me that the main groove is the Fats Domino boogie, and the sax solo is phrased in half time swing. Everything else was fine.  My solo on Jealous Guy held promise, but I couldn't deliver.  My solo on Will it Go Round in Circles  (written an...

Yacht Rock was at the Georgia Theatre in Athens Thursday night.  The seven regular guys haven't played together since July 27 in Hilton Head.  Reunited!  I could definitely feel the vibe of the seven of us back together again.  Coupled with the Theatre and a good crowd, we were in for a good night! Wednesday afternoon, I developed (out of the blue) severe vertigo, so bad that I could barely get home.  I still had it Thursday morning, which made loading my gear down a flight of stairs and into my truck pretty treacherous, but Advil helped me get through it.  I made it to Athens and got loaded in and set up without issue. Our soundcheck was more of a rehearsal for our Beatles show at Smith's, so I didn't do much more than nearly freeze to death under the Theatre's air conditioner.  When we finished, I took a walk around Athens to try and possibly locate a drug store with a clinic, but no luck.  I did almost fall down, though, in the middle of...

Ouch.  On three hours of sleep, I wandered into my morning church gig.  Fortunately, it was pretty easy--all tenor (with a little bit of clarinet at the end), and the tunes had enough space for me to play a little bit.  My excitement of the morning happened in the introduction of the biggest song we did--the recording (I am told) began with a big trumpet fanfare.  The best I could do was to play it all up at the top of my altissimo range, beginning on a high C.  As we came up to this song in the service, my mind went blank, and I had no idea how to finger that note;  then I thought I remembered it, but there was no way to check if I was hearing the correct pitch.  It all worked out. Having a late gig like the previous night with an early gig like this morning really messes me up.  I came home from my AM church gig and went back to bed for four or five hours. My evening church gig was pretty good.  I think I've finally found a good spot on...