Fourth of July

Yacht Rock was fortunate to celebrate the Fourth of July with a gig--that week where we didn't have any gigs was tough on our bank accounts!  This show was an indoor event at a hotel in Buckhead, with two sets broken up by the fireworks show over Lenox Square Mall.  The crowd was on the small side (I think the days and days of rain made it tough), but the people who hired us were very cool, and the duck tacos were delicious!

So…we loaded into the room super early (1 PM), piled our gear in the corner, and split.  Dinner was at 6:30 PM.  I left for a few hours, and then came back and spent an hour in one of the hotel rooms.  That right there is pretty sweet.  6:30 was a small mishmash of food--go for the duck taco.  At 7:45 the opening band (Moontower) finished, and we did the ol' throw and go.  The results were not so great.  All my gear had to go to the far side of the stage, and with the multiple Napoleon Dynamites for stage hands, there was always someone standing either in my path or my destination.  One of my sax microphone transmitters would not turn on, so I troubleshot that as we were going.  Also, the stage was pretty small, and there were cables everywhere.  Who puts the snake for the PA in the downstage right corner?  How about a more central location?  It seemed like half the microphones on stage ran under my gear.

The first set was tough.  There was some unresolved feedback coming from the vocal microphones.  My sax mic (I switched my working pack back and forth between horns) also had a noisy moment when I turned sideways on stage.  We persevered.  The room was really hot--it felt like there was no air conditioning.

On the break, the sound guys ironed out the feedback issue (for the most part).  Also, my dead mic transmitter finally came back to life--I think it got damp coming home from the Park Tavern last week.  After a set where it sat out (and I stared at it--mental troubleshooting!), it came back from the dead.

Some lady came up to Bencuya on the break to tell him how much better he was than me, and how much more he contributed to the band.  She can go to hell.

The awesome dude taking care of us brought me more duck tacos.  I ate even though I was not hungry.

The second set was more tolerable.  Most of the crowd (surprisingly) hung with us after the fireworks.  Even though there was a band following us for the late night party, we still ended up doing an encore.  They were cool about it, though.

Special thanks to Ganesh for sitting in on drums.

We loaded out, put everything in the trailer for our big road trip, and that was it!  See you on the next one!

Upcoming gigs:

July 5:  Mercy Lounge (Nashville)
July 8:  Cape May Convention Center (Cape May, NJ)
July 10:  Brooklyn Bowl (New York City)
July 11:  Mohegan Sun (Montville, CT)
July 12:  Power Plant Live (Baltimore)
July 13:  Xfinity Live (Philadelphia)
July 14:  The Hamilton (Washington DC)
July 20:  Chastain Park Amphitheater (Atlanta)
July 26:  The Orange Peel (Asheville)

In other news, I saw some videos of us from Woodstock.  Turn the "saxaphone" up!

Sazerac Session, Day 3

Ouch.  I was up until 4:30 AM, suppressing my David Foster-induced gag reflex in order to get Bill Champlin's tunes on paper.  You're the Inspiration, Hard Habit to Break, Look Away…no thank you.  I liked Chicago better when they had a horn section (and balls).  I was up again at 8:30.

Rehearsal went pretty well.  The above mentioned sugar coated crap went fairly well.  We also reviewed stuff we'll need for next week's world tour of the northeast.  Elliot Lurie's Jimmy Loves MaryAnn bit me in the ass repeatedly.  Looks like I'll be playing that a few hundred times in the next couple of days. 

After lunch and a quickie shower, I was off to my third day of recording on the Sazerac project, Greg Lee and Co.'s New Orleans inspired band.  Today was solo day, and I played some stuff on Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley and Gonna Move.  Inspired by the original, we put two sax solos right on top of each other for Sneakin'.  The result is a cool effect--if I remember, it's takes one and three (or maybe three and four), and I'm using lots of the same ideas, so things get tossed back and forth randomly, but one part never acknowledges the other.  As I'm thinking about now, it was actually kind of Ornette sounding, which is always a plus.  Super damn cool.  I can't wait to hear that!

I made it home around 6:30 PM.  I was asleep at 7, and woke up at 10:45 AM the next day.

Playing Dead

So…some weirdness at the ol' AM church gig.  We did the usual opening of a couple of hymns jammed together.  That left two big songs in the book.  We played through the second, and after hearing the vibe of it, I decided to just play flute (mostly just grabbing the top part of the piano score).  For the first big song, the director brought a flutist from the choir to play…hmm.  My first choice for an instrument would've been flute, so I just kind of hung back and checked out what she was going to play to see if there was room left for me (there actually were some harmony lines to her flute part).  I got my clarinet out to try that at soundcheck.  Clarinet would be a nice blend with the flute.

We went upstairs to set up and soundcheck after rehearsal, and the flutist plopped her music on my stand and literally boxed me out of playing onstage.  Uhhh, now what?  I guess I wasn't meant to play on this one!  Kind of a weird situation--I played saxophone for the opening, walked off, she played flute, then went back to the choir and I played flute.

Anyway, this left me with significant down time during their performance, which I utilized by taking pictures of myself just off the side of the stage.

This happened for two services.  For the second service, I went upstairs and listened to everybody else. It sounds really good--nice work, Matt!  Difficult to stay whether or not my offstage clarinet part would have improved things.  I did get a nice picture of director, flute, and myself together.  I bet if I'd had a blue shirt, they'd have let me play.

After all the fun, I went home and worked on charting out Bill Champlin/Chicago songs for a Yacht Rock rehearsal.  My hatred of Chicago 17 returns twenty-nine years later!

The PM church gig was pretty decent.  I had a nice mix going (and no further complaints from the rhythm section), and my soprano playing was pretty good.  Flute was just OK.  It probably would've been better if I'd played it more in the morning.

After supper, it was back to the Champlin charting.  Up all night!

Steely Dan at The Strand

I was really jealous that the Yacht Rock Schooner got to play a Steely Dan tribute at The Strand in Marietta, a mere 10-15 minutes from my house, so it was really cool that I was invited to be in the horn section (playing bari sax).  Kudos to the band for doing such a good job, and particularly Jordan Shalhoup for dealing with the horn players (one of whom quit the gig during soundcheck!) and all the horn charts.  He also nailed all the sax solos.  Impressive work!

I really enjoyed being able to lay my bari in the case after the show and walk out the stage door.  I never get out that quickly!

Monkey on Fire

Yacht Rock played our monthly show at the Park Tavern last night to a nice sized crowd--not sold out or over-sold out, but a comfortable sized group.  For this one, we pulled out all of our stoner stuff, inspired by the movie Dazed and Confused.  It rocked a little more than usual, but the crowd still dug it.

Mark Dannells got his old amp (the Egnater!) back together for the first time in a long time, cleared some of the pedals off his pedalboard, and played the absolute hell out of our gig.  He was on fire the whole night--great solos throughout.  I think (same as any of us), that being able to hear your instrument clearly makes a huge difference in the way one plays.  If it doesn't sound right, it's going to be a tough gig.  Anyway, Monkeyboy was super awesome last night.  Long live the Egnater!

Other than that, it was business as usual on a muggy night in the tent.  See y'all at Chastain!

Fish Food

Long day yesterday…

I started with a Yacht Rock rehearsal for tonight's Dazed and Confused show.  It's a little outside of our normal batch of tunes--more stoner rock and less polyester.  Not too bad.  There are a couple of tunes where I have nothing to play.

From there, I loaded in to the Aquarium at 1 for a 2 PM rehearsal for a House Live gig.  It turned out that we really didn't need to be at the rehearsal (it was more for rehearsing the speeches and awards).  Mostly, I did this.

Somewhere in the middle, we squeezed in a thirty second line check, and then we left for pizza and beer.

A few hours later, Jeremy, Wayne, and I returned to play the show.  Two hours to go!  The room looked great.  A billion LEDs and other cool lighting effects lit up the ballroom.  We played thirty minutes, stopped for ten minutes, played ten minutes, stopped for twenty minutes, played thirty minutes, and then hung out for thirty minutes until we could pull our gear off the stage.  Pretty easy.  The only thing that was a drag was that the band was really spread out across the stage with no monitors, so we couldn't hear what the other two guys were playing.  Sometimes I could hear the beat from the DJ, but never the key, so random noodling prevailed.  I have no idea what Wayne was doing. I guess it was quiet enough in the room that it didn't matter that nothing we played gelled.

So be it!  I was home at 10 PM.

Sounds from the Underground

The David Freeman Quartet (with Tyrone Jackson, Kevin Smith, and Mark Raudabaugh) played a public jazz gig for the first time in a long time last night at Elliott Street Pub, part of a jazz series put on by Jacob Deaton called Sounds from the Underground.  It was super fun--the band went full throttle on every tune.  We managed to squeeze four tunes into our fifty minutes (or the other way around--we only got through four tunes in fifty minutes!).  Thanks to Jacob for sitting in on Guitar Song, and for Mark for accepting the gig at the last minute.

The band made $10.  That's pretty funny.  If you subtract the band (and their significant others) from the crowd, I think there were five people there.  Still, super fun, and everybody played their best!