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!

Thrown Together

It's been a long week.  Here we are again at the Sunday church gigs post.

The AM church gig was really thrown together.  Our normal song leader/vocalist was in the hospital recovering from surgery, so the band leader went out front, which moved Dustin from guitar to piano.  Things were shuffled, to say the least.  More than instrumentation, everybody keys off the piano, and when the leading is coming from the guy twenty feet out front with his back to us, things are less concrete.

We got through everything, though.  Tommy Dodd was there on pedal steel, though I didn't hear him play much.  There wasn't really any room in the music for either one of us by the nature of the songs that were chosen.  I ended up playing lots of whole notes.

Bryan Lopes tweaked some things on my soprano to really get it in top condition.  Specifically, he strengthened the spring on the G key so that every time I touch it it doesn't open the second octave key vent.  Much better!  If you are a regular reader, you might recall that touching the G key when playing a high B or C# caused them to go a quarter step sharp.

My PM church gig was not too bad.  I played lots of soprano (still trying to get used to the new horn), still dialing in the intonation.  It's getting there.  I think it might be about time to record and see what the whole band sounds like.

NC Tour

Yacht Rock is home today after spending last weekend bouncing around North Carolina.  A pretty good weekend, I'd say, with heavy grooves laid down in Raleigh, Charlotte, and Winston-Salem.  The recap:

Thursday:  no Greg for the van ride up (he was already in North Carolina on vacation), so I packed the trailer.  Not too bad.  When we eventually reached our destination, everything was still where I'd left it, so I'll say that was a success.

We stopped for lunch at a place with decent food but crappy service.  When we tried to get our checks so we could get back on the road, the waitress actually accepted a phone call and proceeded to lean on the bar and talk to somebody for maybe six or seven minutes, with all of us standing there watching her.  Not impressive.  She's lucky that the gratuity was added into the bill.

As we got closer to Raleigh, a major storm closed in on us.  First it was to the side of the interstate, and then as the road turned, it was in our rear view mirror.  We tried to outrun it so we could load into the theatre before the rain, but we got caught in traffic.  Things were pretty tense there for a minute.  In the end, it passed us by, so load in was no problem.

Our show at the Lincoln Theatre was tough.  First, the rain and traffic made us almost an hour late for load in, which squeezed out any kind of rehearsal we could do at soundcheck.  Pete was on vacation for the entire week, so we had Greg in his place and Rob Henson on bass.  In the vocal harmonies, Greg stayed on his parts so Bencuya, Cobb, Dannells, and maybe me picked up Pete's vocals.  I sucked real bad at that.  I mean, I'd never tried to sing and play on a gig before so I had no coordination--most of my attempts ended up with me singing the string line or whatever I was playing on keyboard.  No good!

I guess I was sitting in kind of a bass trap on stage at the Lincoln--the drums and bass were really loud and I couldn't get comfortable.  There was a monitor for me, but I figured that blasting more stuff at my head was not the solution.  That and the wrong notes from trying to sing and play and then the wrong notes from me not being focused on what we were doing and the on stage sound quickly crushed my spirits.  Even when I went up front to play saxophone, I couldn't hear myself on stage or out in the house.  Boo.  I trudged through to the end.  Not my best work.

Due to the extreme weather, just over a hundred people were there to fitness my musical death.  Fortunately, Bencuya didn't record this.

I almost forgot…afterwards, we went out in search of food because we didn't get to eat before we played.  We ended up at the Five Star Restaurant, a cool looking Chinese place at the end of a block.  After parking out front, we went in and sat down.  At the bar was a presumed prostitute, two guys, and a couple on a landing above the bar making out.  Someone who worked there eventually came over--"Where'd you play tonight?" was the first thing he said.  We talked for a minute and he informed us that the kitchen had been closed for a few hours.  Since we'd stopped in, though, he asked us to do a shot with him.  Sure.  So there we are doing a shot of Makers Mark with him, and he decided to finish off the bottle.  It ended up being at least a cup of whiskey for each of us.  He then sent us on our way with a couple of suggestions for food.  It was totally surreal.

We ate at a place called The Raleigh Times.  Great food in the middle of the night.

Friday:  we moved on to Charlotte for a gig at the NC Music Factory.  It's a pretty cool place with restaurants and multiple music venues (there's a Fillmore at the same location).  Our stage was outside in the courtyard between a bar and a restaurant.  It looked like a loading dock with a tin roof covering us.  No ramp leading up to the stairs--only stairs.  Boo.

We ate lunch downtown.  Perfect weather.

Our show here was also kind of difficult.  There was plenty of room on stage and plenty of PA, but the stage and tin roof resonated with every low G that was played.  Songs like Peg and Rosanna were nightmares (both with lots of G's)--you could hear nothing but the low feedback that sounded like a tugboat horn.

It's too bad.  I played some of my best stuff in a long time, particularly on Takin' it to the Streets, but I think the sound became a huge distraction for the band.  I don't know if maybe it wasn't a problem out front, or the sound guy just couldn't solve the problem.

In fact, aside from the tugboat G thing, I was fine with the sound.  I could hear everything, and I could hear saxophone in the main PA.  I gotta admit, I love it when my horn is loud.  It's difficult to play when it feels like I'm playing into a pillow.

Singing-wise, we (and I) were much better.  Things came together much more than the night before.  I figured out which songs I could sing on and which ones were just too different from my hands.

During the second set, the smart light at the front of the stage caught fire.  Smoke poured out of it for half a song until one of the crew unplugged it and pulled it off the stage.  It was a nice diversion from GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!  Nice electrical fire smell.

I think there were maybe a thousand people there.  At the end of the night, we were standing around taking pictures with fans, and some guy pulled me aside.

NC Guy:  Tell me the truth.  Are you really playing the saxophone?

Me:  Yes.  (then, realizing this was a great opportunity to lie)  Wait, truthfully?  No.  It's just a really expensive prop.

NC Guy:  I thought so.

That's kind of a compliment, right?

Saturday:  Winston-Salem!  We played Ziggy's.  Rob and Monkey said that the old Ziggy's was rough venue, but the new place is really nice.  The room sounds good, the stage is big, the load in is easy, the sound guy is good.  We played to around a hundred people, but Ziggy's people dug it, so I think we'll be back.  They also have a Ziggy's opening in Delaware, so maybe we can hit that one too.

Another good night of playing.  The singing was better and the playing was better.  I didn't quite crush Takin' it to the Streets, but it was still good.  Nice gig.  I heard later that some bartender almost got his ass kicked by Greg and Mark Cobb.

Sunday:  the long drive home.  Our van is tired.  It needs some transmission work.

I made it to my PM church gig.  Pretty good mix, I would say, and for not playing soprano or flute all week, my face still worked well.  We had one singer, though.  Where is everybody?

Holy Dave

It used to be the norm, but lately it seems kind of unusual for me to play both of my church gigs.  I'm either out of town, got a better paying gig in town, or my (AM) church gig cancels on me.

My AM church gig was pretty easy.  A couple of hymns (with a "hackety-sax" transition), a chord sheet, and a big song with page turns every six measures.  Pretty easy stuff, though I never trust that what we do in rehearsal will work in front of the congregation (I'm talking about the aforementioned transition).  It really did, though.

Now that we're back to acoustic drums and a bass amp on stage, things sound and feel pretty good.  We're a band again!

Maybe it was the weather, or maybe I'm recovering from the weekend, but I crashed pretty hard once I got home.  Multiple hour nap.  Yes.

My PM church gig was ok.  I thought I had a pretty good mix going (mixing on headphones and checking without) with the vocals plenty out front, and it was questioned whether or not one of the singers was loud enough.  I also had a complaint (these are all from within the band, stationed in a corner of the church and away from the church speakers) that the piano was not loud enough.  The gain on the vocal was fine.  I turned up the entire mix and bumped the piano up and panned it to the band side of the room.  Too loud, I was told.  I set the volume back to where I'd begun the mass.  Everybody was happy for a minute.  At the end, I got a comment that the mix seemed muddy.  I give up.

The pianist and the guitarist tend to play the same thing at the same time (both doing an arpeggiated/finger picking accompaniment) on the same song, or both playing in the same register (and both playing bass notes).  To keep it from being a big mush, I panned the piano to the left (opposite) side of the church (since I assume that the sound of the acoustic piano is also contributing to the sound in the room, as well as being picked up by the vocal and drum mics, coming down the center and panned right, respectively).  I had the guitar panned right.  In my headphones, it works really well.  Piano and woodwinds in the left ear, vocals in the middle, guitar and drums on the right.  Somebody else wanna come mix for a while?  How about I stop and play my instruments for a little bit?

Oh yeah!  I play sax and flute sometimes when I'm not chasing the gain on the guitar!  My soprano is feeling good, and flute felt great--thanks.

Moving on!

I'm totally hooked on bassist Omer Avital.  His newest record, Suite of the East, is great, but the one I like best is Live at Smalls.  Totally awesome.  I found him by chasing down YouTube videos of one of my favorite sax players, Joel Frahm.  Check this one out (same band as Live at Smalls).  I'd kill to play in this group.

Woodstock

Wow!  Yacht Rock played an awesome show last night for the the City of Woodstock--part of their summer concert series.  Nice stage, good crew, good weather, and an amazing crowd!

Our first set was all BeeGees.  We'd played through all the newer tunes Friday night, so everybody knew what was happening on Saturday.  It also worked out well because all of those tunes are so groove oriented, the rhythm section got really locked in by the time we got to the yacht rock set.  All that stuff is fun, and harmonically much hipper than I would have guessed when I was a kid.

The second set was a big yacht rock feast.  Nice and easy!  Nick programmed a great set list--good pacing and a couple of less played favorites mixed in with our standard stuff.

Here are a couple of excerpts.  I post these as much to highlight Mark Cobb's phenomenal drumming as my own playing.



Man!  Those are really fun moments.  Soloing in a setting like that feels like there's electrical current flowing through me.

The crowd was estimated to be between seven and eight thousand.  Incredible!  Afterwards, we signed lots of autographs, which is a really bizarre thing.  I'm not going to get used to that.

All that, and I was home, gear put away, and showered by midnight!  Yes!

We're on the road next week with stops in Raleigh (Lincoln Theatre), Charlotte (NC Music Factory), and Ziggy's (Winston-Salem) next Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  Come see us!

Beauty Pageant

Yacht Rock played a golf club mixer party at Druid Hills Country Club.  Great gig!  We did this one last year, and it was similarly awesome.  Lots of talent--good looks must be part of the membership application.

It was a fun crowd, and we had a good time with them.  As an added bonus, we had Kip on sound.

Mark Cobb brought a new drum kit--a Questlove Breakbeats kit (sixteen inch kick, one tom).  It provided much inspiration.

We're in Woodstock tonight for a free show!  Come see us!

Sazerac Session, Day 2

I met up with the one and only Greg Lee (and Wyatt) at Madison Studios for another Sazerac horn session.  Last time we'd done Southern Nights, Gonna Move, Fat Man in a Bathtub, All That You Dream, and It's a New Day.  Tonight's agenda was Give it What You Can, Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley, Sailing Shoes, and Hey Julia.  Not a bad way to spend an evening, eh?

We tackled Give it What You Can first.  Tough tune, somewhat because of my chart (which looked a little complicated when sight-reading), but mostly because of my difficulty with transposing the bari part from concert pitch.  Ouch.  Things got really bogged down.  I sucked real bad.  Perhaps I should have practiced these things before I tried to record them?  Hmm?  Getting all the parts down for this took two and a half hours.  Four horn parts (alto, tenor 1, tenor 2, bari) plus some of the alto up an octave.

From there, things accelerated.  Sneakin' Sally--easy.  Sailing Shoes--yep.  I finally got in a groove.

The last tune of the evening was Hey Julia.  We decided to replace the female vocal parts with a pair of clarinets.  Not a big deal, though I playing something up a whole step but down an octave on clarinet  requires some brain power.  As we began recording the second voice, all of the sudden my head exploded;  I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't remember what I was doing, what the transposition was, how to play.  Everything in my head was screaming AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!! and I somehow managed to play without directly thinking about anything--sort of the mental equivalent of "hold still for just a second."  Whew!  With that, the session was over.  Made it!

In the final one, we'll do any touch ups and add the solos (2 alto, 1 tenor).  No transposing!

Aquarium Live

I did a House Live gig at the Aquarium last night with Jeremy as DJ and Steven playing percussion.  Not a bad night!  Jeremy does a good job of looping sections to blow over, and then releasing them once I'm done.  It definitely makes for a more musical situation.  Steven played congas and an electronic pad--a good combination for what we were doing.

There's not much to say beyond that.  Looks like the Aqaurium has new handlers for the band guys.  They seem pretty cool.  We got a good laugh when they asked if we knew how to get back to the loading dock.  We said yes, thank you, but we're going out through the parking deck.  When the handlers explained that door was locked, and then we explained that we sneak out through the emergency exit (and the handlers didn't know what we were talking about), things got complicated.  So…yes, we know how to get out, probably better than you do.  Let's just leave it at that.

There was plenty of down time before the gig.  Here are some pictures.

Sunday Night

No Saturday night gig!  Bummer.  I spent the day at the pool;  Saturday night, I stopped by Bryan Lopes' house (also not working Saturday night!) and picked up my new soprano (the 62), which he fixed up for me.  Nice.  Always a great hang.  Lopes was breaking in a reed for his morning church gig.  Funny how a two minute exchange ("here's your horn/here's your money") becomes forty minutes of laughing.

The soprano plays great.  I did mess around with the position of the G key.  The left hand upper octave stuff on this horn is a little different--for one thing, the octave key closes a small tone hole above the usual C.  It brings the upper C# more in tune.  I thought that maybe I wasn't pressing the octave key down all the way sometimes, allowing the C# to go waaaaaaaaaaaaay sharp--like most of the way to D.  In fiddling with the horn and a tuner and paying attention to what my left hand was doing, I realized that touching the G key was allowing the secondary octave key to open a little bit (there's already a little movement when you push the octave key--gotta get Lopes to check that).  Opening the G octave pip sends the C# waaaaaaaaaaaaay sharp.  The solution is to maybe not rest my finger on that key at all (easier said than done), but I also bent the G key down closer to the body a little more so it's not right in the natural curve of my hand.

So…there may be some secondary horn work coming up after all the pads settle and I can get back over there to Lopes' house.  We'll see.  I played it some more Sunday night, and after getting a couple of good reeds happening, the horn is feeling really good.

Anyway…

I got shut out of my Sunday AM church gig.  I guess we all did--it was just a kid's choir with piano accompaniment.  Boo.

Sunday night, I was back on the job at my PM church gig.  Good to be back!  I did a lot of warming up on flute, so I felt good on both horns.  I might actually have a couple of days to play my horns before I have to learn something special for an upcoming Yacht Rock gig!

Purple Rain

Last night, Yacht Rock performed the album Purple Rain as part of our summer concert series.  This show was in a huge tent at the Promenade, up in the northern part of the park behind the Botanical Gardens.  I'd never been up there before;  I'd venture to guess that most park goers had no idea of its existence.  To get there, we had to enter at 10th Street and weave through all the curvy paths and past the power washer guy who was waving us the wrong way.

Anyway…the gig went fine, and it was packed.  The last I heard, there were 1,300 tickets pre sold.  I'm impressed that that many people found the tent.

Do you remember how it felt to take a really huge exam in college?  How ever you'd describe that feeling when you finish--relief?  satisfaction?--that's what finishing Purple Rain felt like.  I don't have much of a feeling for how I played.  I think I did fine, but there was almost no emotion attached to it.  At this point, I have pretty much no recollection of what I did.

The second set was regular Yacht Rock, and we cut loose a bit.

This was the debut of Cartoon Butterfly, another of our originals from our EP.  It's a really harmonically hip tune by Mark Bencuya.  I'm wondering if it's ever been publicly performed before.  With this tune and Lowdown, I ended up playing more flute than alto.

This is what it sounds like When Doves Cry.




Upcoming dates (with Yacht Rock unless otherwise noted):

June 8, Woodstock Summer Concert Series (Woodstock, GA)
June 13, Lincoln Theatre (Raleigh, NC)
June 14, NC Music Factory (Charlotte, NC)
June 15, Ziggy's (Winston-Salem, NC)
June 24, Sounds from the Underground--David Freeman Quartet (Atlanta, GA)
June 28, Park Tavern (Atlanta, GA)
June 29, Strand Theatre-Schooner Steely Dan show (Marietta, GA)
July 8 Cape May Convention Hall (Cape May, NJ)
July 10 Brooklyn Bowl (New York City)
July 11 Mohegan Sun (Connecticut)
July 12, Power Plant Live! (Baltimore, MD)
July 13, XFinity Live!  Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA)
July 14, The Hamilton (Washington DC)
July 20, Yacht Rock Revival at Chastain! (Atlanta)
July 26, Orange Peel (Asheville, NC)
August 16-17, Smith's Olde Bar--Please Pleaserock Me (Atlanta, GA)
August 23, Park Tavern (Atlanta)
September 27, Park Tavern (Atlanta)
October 19, Thriller at Variety Playhouse (Atlanta)
November 1, Music Farm (Charleston, SC)