I had a rough trio gig last night. Tyrone Jackson, Nadav Spiegelman, and myself were booked as a trio for background music at a corporate dinner. Great, right? I've probably played five hundred of these--we do our thing, they eat, everybody's happy.
We began with my tune Under a Tree:
You might notice while the piano and bass are soloing, I am in conference with two ladies (agent/hand holder people). The lady who hired them (who in turn hired me) is freaked out. Basically, she doesn't like what we're playing and wants to know what else we can do…like…I don't know…blues was thrown out as a different genre, to which I countered that it's going to sound like a jazz trio playing a blues. Then it went to pop music, whatever that means. This one stumped me. Obviously the instrumentation severely limits what we're capable of doing, and who knows what pop tunes we might know between us and be able to pull off.
The best we could do was to play the very common jazz songs that freak out lady would recognize. Next up was Georgia on my Mind.
From there, I played it like it was wedding band first set, so we hit Route 66, Just the Two of Us, Girl from Ipanema, and What a Wonderful World. That pretty much sucked all the energy and enthusiasm out of the band. We continued on for a set and a half like this, bored out of our minds. In the middle of the second set, we started easing back into stuff we wanted to play, and by the third set we were into the Joe Henderson tunes (Shade of Jade, Inner Urge, and Punjab closed out the evening). That was really fun.
Better luck next time!
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