House Gig #1

Yacht Rock played a gig last night at a house--a surprise birthday party for a local golf pro.  The local golf pro's good friend is Stewart Cink (he of PGA fame), and the party was at Cink's house.

Unbelievable house!  With the exception of a house in Buckhead where I once did a solo sax gig, this was the most insanely extravagant house I've ever been inside.  Let's just say, does your basement have enough space for a stage?

Here are some pictures (keep in mind that this is all basement!)

Stewart Cink's office

The gig was one of our better performances.  Bencuya was back;  his solo on Hey Nineteen made my previous night's effort seem really really bad.  I was embarrassed just watching him play.

The rest of the band played well.  It was a low pressure gig, but nobody blew it off.  Good stuff all around.

PS.  Stewart Cink is 6 foot 4.  Really really tall.

davidfreemanmusic.net

Two Solos!

Yacht Rock played the 10 High last night without the one and only Mark Bencuya, who was on vacation.    Eric Frampton covered his role.  Much like my exciting outing with the Schooner at the Dixie Tavern, some of the keyboard parts were flipped--super cool because I got to play some different parts!  It was really fun, and I only sucked real bad occasionally.

I took TWO keyboard solos!  One on Hey Nineteen (that's me on rhodes),

 Hey Nineteen by David B Freeman

and one on The Biggest Part of Me (me on organ and then saxophone).

 The Biggest Part of Me by David B Freeman

Oh well.  It was fun anyway.  I mean, when else do I get a chance to go for it?

Just for fun, here's my organ part and sax solo on Takin' it to the Streets.  It kind of strays from the original:

 Takin' it to the Streets by David B Freeman

Fun!  Bencuya's back tonight, so we're back to normal.  The end of my vacation, too!

davidfreemanmusic.net

Duo Gig!

Tyrone Jackson and I played a duo gig last night at the Hyatt downtown.  Since it was just the two of us, I plopped a Real Book on the music stand in front of us and away we went.

I looked pretty good, but didn't play well.  Some of it was that I just didn't have it…I just couldn't get going.  I think the bigger issue was that I had a couple of uninspiring reeds.  I am listening to the recording as I type this and the sound is fine--sounds like me!--but it was hard work.  I had to put to much effort into playing the gig.  Sometimes it just flows.  Tonight--nope!

Anyway, I settled on a reed that was like a 2x4.  I made it through the night, but that reed wore me out.  Looks like a trip to the store tomorrow to buy another box.

Here's the audio:



A few thoughts:

1.  The first note of El Gaucho is an E, not a G like the book says.  I made this mistake the last time I played this tune out the book.

2.  Tyrone suggested Half Nelson, a tune I haven't given much thought to about fifteen years!  The chords came back to me;  the melody did not.

3.  I'd never played The Night has a Thousand Eyes.  It's hard not hear Coltrane on that one.

4.  I had set up my tenor and soprano, but had only played the former.  One of the techie dorks came over while were playing Voyage and said, "Are you going to play your soprano?  I'm a sax player too.  I play soprano, alto, and tenor."  Then I kicked him in the teeth.  Just kidding.  That's the reason I played soprano on Out of Nowhere, though.  The techie dork came around again later to see what were playing--I avoided eye contact.

Not bad for a Wednesday night!

davidfreemanmusic.net

Saturday/Sunday

Yacht Rock played a wedding at the Capital City Club in Brookhaven Saturday night.  Weddings can be fun--it can be another gig you play, and there might be half a dozen really cool moments.  On the other hand, a wedding reception can drag on forever--you're playing a gig (usually in a four hour block) in a room with poor acoustics in front of an audience who isn't there to see you.  It can become a drag really early.

This particular reception was the latter…we pushed on through it, but everybody was checking the clock.

When we started, I noticed that'd left the volume on my amplifier really low, so as a challenge, I backed it down--in fact, I played just about all of the second and third sets with the volume completely off (independent of my signal going to the PA, so it didn't effect what I sounded like in the room…presumably).  Even though the volume knob was at zero, I could still hear the sounds in my head--pretty cool.

It was kind of curious that nobody else in the band mentioned my lack of on stage sound.  Was it acoustics or indifference?

My two Sunday church gigs were pretty regular.  Looking back, I can't think of anything significant about either one.  Both sounded good.  Easy stuff.

davidfreemanmusic.net

Watts and Watts of Power

Yacht Rock played the 40 Watt in Athens last night.  Another terrific gig!

I think we've got our thing in Athens down.  We know how to navigate, where to eat, where the record store is.  The crowds are really good now--last night was not as packed as the Georgia Theatre gig, but it was solid--maybe three quarters full.  They loved us, we loved them;  we played two encores!

The first set went really well for me until the very end.  The last tune was Easy Lover, and when we started I noticed that my bell sound didn't have any delay on it.  Weird, I thought.  Then when I went to the main synth lick, it DID have delay on it.  Somehow I've managed to switch the effects routing.  I tried to do my best playing the marimba parts on the verse with my left hand while scrolling with my right.  Difficult!  What I eventually ended up doing was bringing up that synth sound in the patch category and flipping back and forth between the performance (with the keyboard split) and the patch to get through the set.

Shortly into the second set, the batteries on my EWI went down, and so I stole the four AA batteries from my sax transmitters to power it (it happened in Hey Nineteen, so I played my opening lick and then had two verses/choruses to get the thing back up and running before the solo!).  I spent the remainder of the gig trying to mentally plan if I needed batteries in a saxophone where they would come from.  This came true on Caribbean Queen--I play EWI on the intro, and then I had the first verse to steal batteries from my MIDI transmitter (also AA batteries), stick them in my tenor, and be ready to play at the chorus on the keyboard.  It's a lot to think about.

Hopefully my gear will settle down tonight.

We had a really good time!  The sound at the 40 Watt is really good.  I wish they were all like that.

davidfreemanmusic.net

Nothing too Unusual

Fully recovered from last week's excitement, Yacht Rock returned (most of us) to the 10 High for our usual Thursday night gig.  Nick is still on vacation and Dannells is still in California.

Nothing too unusual about this one.  We were a little worried because the wet weather had knocked out power in a few spots around town, but things were fine and the crowd was decent.

Mark Cobb was on fire.  I miss Dannells.

davidfreemanmusic.net

November 2 Quartet

I had the pleasure of playing a nice quartet gig at CNN Center Wednesday night.  The band this time was Louis Heriveaux on keyboard, Kevin Smith on bass, and Marlon Patton on drums.  Great playing!  It was a real pleasure to have these guys play with me--each one has a strong personality on his instrument.    There were lots of creative moments…and I tried to keep up!

Here's audio from the gig:



For the most part, we played to an empty room (it was more like a canyon).  The first set was supposed to be a cocktail hour, so the crowd was off to the side.  The second set was a buffet dinner, but even then it was only a couple of hundred people spread out.  It didn't feel like much.

They ignored us; we ignored them.  A lady who got on the elevator with me after the gig asked where I was playing, and her friend said "He was playing the whole night!"  The first lady replied, "I must have missed it."  Yep.

davidfreemanmusic.net