Thursday, April 14, 2011

Tuesday Night Trio, Wednesday Night House Music

I had a trio gig Tuesday night.  Yay!  It was another party for Microsoft developers.  We played at a house turned club called Metropolitan--we were on the front patio, dueling pianos were in the front room of the house, the DJ was in the upstairs…there was probably somebody else in there too.  Anyway, the front door was open and the dueling pianists were super loud--annoyingly so.  We had a hard time hearing each other because of the volume they were putting out.  Mix that with the traffic, and it was a noisy environment for a jazz gig.

We would have done my tunes, but I figured that between the steady breeze and the impending darkness, it would be best to not try and deal with charts.  I called standards instead, except that I don't really remember too many because I never play them, so I was a bit rough!  Sorry about that.  I made more than enough mistakes.

I did the gig with Louis Heriveaux and Kevin Smith, who did their usual excellent job.  The gig was supposed to be a four hour hit, but they set us free about fifty minutes early.  Another yay!  After the sun went down, we all got kind of chilly, and I could really feel my hands not moving smoothly any more.  Louis actually went and got a heater out of his car!  How about that!

I shot some iPhone video in addition to my usual audio recording.  The editing and uploading to YouTube is a slow process.  Here are the two tunes I've done so far.





Here's the audio.



Wednesday morning, I got up and headed back to rehearsal.  Things are going better!  I'm more or less out of my charts at this point, and it's just the coordination of moving from one sound to the next that's getting me.  Bencuya's making his adjustments, and I'm adjusting to his adjustments, too, but things are mostly settled between us.  By next week, we should be a fairly well oiled machine…too bad the the gig's this weekend!  I'm a little stressed about it, but I think I'm going to be ok, provided I get in some good practice time over the next forty-eight hours.

Wednesday night was a House Live gig at Ventanas.  Not much to report.  It was pretty easy--only about forty or fifty people, and they spent most of the evening out on the open patio (and not in the room with us), so we kind of entertained ourselves, which of course meant that I got to play drums for about twenty minutes at the end of the night.  Going into the gig, we heard rumors about helicopter rides, but it never happened.  Boo.  Oh well, Wayne wasn't there tonight, and I wouldn't have wanted him to miss it.

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