David Freeman Music

Wednesday night was another installment of Scott Glazer's Mojo Dojo at Blind Willie's.  Scott's put together music (mostly blues, 60s soul, and some other offbeat stuff) for two horns and rhythm section.  David Ellington has been the keyboardist as of late, joined by Nick Johnson on guitar.  The drummer's chair seems to rotate between several players, and the horns (trumpet and tenor sax) are usually Mace Hibbard and either Melvin Jones or Russell Gunn.  This month, however, Justin Powell and I were the horns, and Jon Chalden on drums. It's a fun gig and a great hang!  Tyrone Jackson sat in on organ for a few songs in each set and blew us away.  Actually, pretty much everybody blew me away--I lost the onstage battle of volume and chops.  They go hand in hand for me--if I have to begin my solo at 85% intensity because of the onstage volume, it severely narrows my range of musical ideas.  Still, it was fun to be on stage with all of these guys, do...

One more little private party for the weekend...Yacht Rock played an afternoon birthday party (I think--it may have been some other kind of party) at a restaurant in Buckhead.  If you were around Atlanta ten or fifteen years ago, there used to be a cluster of bars right in this area, but developers bought all of the property and made it a high end, Rodeo Drive sort of thing.  Ferraris and Aston Martins were parked outside. Anyway, this one was a major throw and go.  We had all of our gear piled up at the back door, and on Kip's signal, we rushed in and set up.  I don't even remember if we sound checked.  Kip used one speaker as the PA. We had Ganesh filling on drums today.  Excellent job.  Also, Zach was off doing something else all weekend, so we had Alan Smith assisting Kip with the audio for this handful of gigs.  Also excellent. The party turned out to be thankfully very painless, a two hour gig with probably twenty-five minutes of ...

Yacht Rock played the annual spring party at the Atlanta Athletic Club Saturday night.  Not as many aggressive housewives as in years past--they turned out to be a pretty well behaved bunch.  Easy gig with no problems, and I was home around 12:30 AM.  Not too shabby. I did a better job on Young Americans  tonight--I've pretty much solidified the intro and the solo (the only parts I'm concerned with playing accurately--the rest is improvised).  One more night and I think I'll have it comfortably committed to memory.

Yacht Rock played a surprise birthday party in Buckhead last night.  Maybe 50 people in attendance, almost all in costumes.  I'd guess that it was a 70s themed party, but some chose the 60s by accident--ironic because everyone in attendance was old enough to recall what the 70s looked like.  Regardless, there was plenty for the eye to see.  Special shout out to Princess Leia in the New Hope  outfit with the big hair buns and everything.  I admire your effort. We added David Bowie's Young Americans  to the set this weekend.  I thought I'd be really excited to play this song since it's 70s David Sanborn soloing over the entire song (hell, the entire record!), but it felt really long.  Maybe it's because the solo vocabulary is pretty rigidly a major pentatonic scale (with the occasional flatted third and flatted seventh).  Anyway, here's my chart.  The intro is important enough that subsequent Bowie tours used what Sanborn pl...

We (Yacht Rock) gave an encore performance of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon  last night at Venkman's.  After that, we played a couple of Beatles songs, a couple of Zeppelin songs, and a couple of The Who songs (I wasn't involved in either the Zepp or Who).  I only play on about half of Dark Side , so it made for a short night for me, which was just fine after an usually long soundcheck and an eternity sitting in traffic in between checking and the gig.  Home by 11:30 PM, and that's only because I had to wait for the show to end so that I could collect my keyboard from the stage.

On the road again!  Yacht Rock made stops in Nashville and Indianapolis last weekend.  Dig it: Thursday:  We hadn't made it far up I-75 before we stopped for gas.  When we did, we discovered that the cap on one of the trailer axles had come off, exposing the bearings to the world.  This has happened to us before, and it's not pretty.  All of the grease is spun out and the bearings burn up.  Very fortunately for us, we happened to be at an exit with a truck/trailer repair place, who sent us up to the next exit to another trailer repair place.  The new cap cost us $5.   Back to my nap. We arrived at the City Winery in Nashville a little bit late (which caused us to miss our field trip to the RCA A Room, a legendary recording studio which would have been really cool to check out).  Too bad.  More importantly, we had to deal with the trailer of gear.  By this photo, I would say it was not my best packing job of the suitcase...

I got a call about subbing Friday night in the pit of a musical at a playhouse south of Atlanta.  Sure!   I thought when I began playing professionally that this would be the bulk of my work, since my degree was in multiple woodwind performance (flute, clarinet, saxophone).  This job was for flute and clarinet (and a tiny bit of piccolo in the opener), so...right up my alley!  I got the book late Wednesday night, hacked through it once before bed (approximately 100 pages), played through it one and a half times Thursday, hit the really tough stuff Friday, and then jumped into traffic and headed to the playhouse. Fortunately, in checking out photos of the playhouse, I noticed that it was outdoors!  Yikes.  Friday night was in the low 50s, making acoustic instruments that much more challenging.   We were basically a little carnival set up in a pasture in the middle of nowhere south of Atlanta.  Kind of weird. So, here's what I walked into: ...