David Freeman Music

As live music begins to pick up momentum, it seems I'll have to go back to updating this blog more than once a month. Until that happens, thought...here's what happened in the month of April! The first big live Yacht Rock gig of the year was to be in Orlando on April 10, performing at the Hops and Hogs Festival at the Central Florida Fairgrounds. We were all curious about playing for people instead of cars, and maybe what sort of a risk we'd be taking as the COVID stuff begins to recede.  The fairgrounds has a nice stage and plenty of room for social distancing! Maybe it was too early to expect to see much of a crowd. I mean, look at all those people! We were stuck in an afternoon lineup between several southern rock bands (the collective love-children of Lynyrd Skynrd and Warrant) and Sugar Ray. Uhh, ok.  Unfortunately(?), a vicious line of the thunderstorms came racing across the state. The winds started blowing gear around, and there was a rumor of a tornado--Old Testam...

Here's a quickie post: This is my transcription of an Instagram post by saxophonist Ryan Devlin, and it looks like a chorus of rhythm changes, maybe in a hotel room. Excellent bop vocabulary!

March was pretty quiet. I played a couple of weddings, made a few videos. It feels like things are moving in the right direction, though. On the first Saturday of March, I played a wedding reception at the Atlanta History Center. It was kind of a pick up jazz sextet with a vocalist, playing standards in really distant keys to accommodate her range. In spite of that (and being unfamiliar with most of the musicians), the fun of winging it made the night fairly enjoyable. I wore a mask for this (pretty much the only way I was willing to play indoors with a hundred and fifty strangers!). Having to open the flap to insert the mouthpiece was a little bit of a hassle, but it was so much fun to play a gig!  After about an hour and a half, we handed the room off to the DJ and split. Home by 10 PM. Love it! A few weeks later, I was invited to play in a jazz duo in Decatur for a wedding--this one was for the ceremony and the cocktail hour. Similarly, this one came together at the last minute,...

Things are very slow right now in the local music biz, so I haven't much to report. A few livestream concerts have been broadcast--the Yacht Rock Valentine's Day Prom, and also the performance of Hot Dads in Tight Jeans , which you can watch on Facebook and YouTube. The Prom was a pay-per-view thing, so I can't share the video, but here are some cool pictures from it: Since then, my time has been focused on recording horns for another Ladies of Soul livestream, cranking out a couple of songs each day. Here's one: Who's Loving You  by the Jackson Five was going to be on the Ladies of Soul show, so I wrote a horn arrangement, and then it ended up getting cut from the setlist. My arrangement didn't really work anyway, so whatever--there's no place to breathe! On a real gig, I/we'd have died. At the very least, we would've needed a time out. Anyway, I made a video out of it. My original plan had been to to just record the background horn parts and maybe ...

Greetings! The music making continues to creep along through January. Here's what I've been up to. Two weeks ago, Yacht Rock reconvened on stage at the Roxy to record our Valentine's Day Prom show. This one leaned into the 80s a bit more than we might normally go, and it was fun to play some different songs...hell, it was fun just to play a show with a band! Also check out the light show that James did! This is from soundcheck. The disco ball was used to great effect.   Speaking of playing some different music:  we're coming up on the one year anniversary of the release of Hot Dads in Tight Jeans , so we got together last week and recorded a show of us playing the entire album. Only about half the songs have ever been played live, so it was a fun challenge to learn the other songs, walk in, sit down, and play them with the same intent that we give to Step  and Bad Tequila.  The keyboard "division of labor" (dividing up the multitude of parts on the album) nece...

It's been the slowest, weirdest December in my lifetime. Oddly enough, though, I did get several calls for gigs, but almost all of them sounded like bad ideas--a jazz duo (yes!), but in somebody's living room with twenty-five people in attendance (hell no!).  Who's taking a gig like that right now, but also, who's putting together parties like that right now? I declined all of those, reminding myself that it would not be worth it to possibly infect anyone in my family for $200.  Last Sunday afternoon, I did take an outdoor jazz gig in College Park that was a lot of fun. Louis Heriveaux, Tommy Sauter, and Ben Johnson joined me for a neighborhood Christmas party in somebody's yard. Great fun with a few old friends! Louis wanted to know if I still hated Christmas tunes--it made me think about it, and I guess my problem is that on these gigs, people want you to politely play everything on Charlie Brown Christmas. I, on the other hand, am usually so excited to be playing...

Saturday afternoon, I began making a video as part of the #GeorgiaOnMyMind campaign to encourage voting in Georgia's upcoming election for the Senate. I wrote the arrangement in an hour or two. My game plan: 1. Feature the different saxophones at different times. The alto has the melody in the first eight measures; the bari has it on the bridge; and the tenor has it for the last eight. 2. Have some sort of big band soli thing where all the voices move with the melody. This is the second eight measures. 3. Lots of rhythm in the supporting voices! I didn't want it to die with a bunch of whole notes under the lead line. Here's page one of my chart. On to recording it! One of my quarantine projects has been to try and transition my recording software from Garageband to Logic. I have enough knowledge to know what I'm trying to accomplish, but finding the corresponding button to push in Logic sometimes takes a while.  The other hurdle on this particular night was transpositio...