David Freeman Music

Yacht Rock played a wedding at the Egyptian Ballroom Saturday night.  I got the feeling they were pretty big fans by the number of specific song requests from our list--probably almost half!  We also learned a shag song (yuck) and Who Loves You by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.  I like this tune a lot, and I think it's a good add.  Hopefully it'll be a keeper.  If nothing else, it's an effort towards changing things up and keeping the set list from going stale.  Same old songs on every gig=bored band. What a video, too.  Funny to think that hairy, middle aged men could be pop stars. The big problem on this gig was the catering, who delivered plates of once hot food to our green room.  Do I really want to try and eat a plate of cold beef, cold fish, cold shrimp, and cold fries?  Got any fruits or vegetables?  This was totally inedible, so I went out to my truck and got a granola bar to carry me through the gig.  Not co...

The first crazy weekend of gigs I've had in a while.  Follow along: Friday:  the final Yacht Rock summer concert series gig at Park Tavern.  Nothing too difficult--we even debuted a few new ones ( I Love You by Climax Blues Band and Islands in the Stream by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton). Midtown got a lot of rain in between soundcheck and the show, and the tent leaked a little bit in my area.  Nothing could really be done about it, and it didn't hit any of my gear directly, so I waited it out.  One leak created a pretty good sized puddle in between my saxophones, which kind of scared me, but there appeared to be no damage. Much like the previous month, I wasn't all that excited about playing the gig, but the crowd was really enthusiastic, so it turned out to be pretty fun.  Both new songs went over well, especially the duet (even though I crashed and burned on the outro).   One other new song that we played was Hotel California , whi...

David Ellington and I played another sax/organ duo gig tonight at a restaurant in Decatur called Sun in my Belly.  Great little gig!  We are really enjoying these quieter performances where we can hear really well.  Much more fun than the previous evening's stress (though there was some stress for me with the traffic--it took Dave eight minutes to get to the restaurant, but it took me an hour and forty minutes!). I'm really happy with my playing on this one.  Check it out:

I played a quartet gig--a dinner/awards ceremony for a local children's hospital.  I think this may be the tenth year I've done the gig.  It's always very stressful for me because they have a very particular script for the evening, and I do my best to drag the other three guys along as we play various people on and off stage throughout the night, in addition to providing music during dinner.  This year the band consisted of Dan Baraszu on guitar, David Ellington on organ, and Henry Conerway III on drums.  Making sure everybody shows up on time and knows what we're doing throughout the evening wears me out. Our set up was not the best--more or less in a line leading away from the stage.  On the recordings, that's why you can't hear the guitar very well--he's on one end of the line and I (and the recorder) am on the other.   Maybe we can fix that for next year?  More importantly, I think it caused some strange tempo problems.  We were not heari...

Quite a weekend for Yacht Rock gigs! Saturday evening, we performed at the Georgia Theatre in Athens.  The theatre broadcasts the UGA games on a giant screen, so we loaded our gear in at half time and uncased most stuff, but couldn't set up and soundcheck until after the game. No big deal, but it made for a pretty long wait.  I think we finally hit the stage around 10:30 PM to a crowd of just under eight hundred. The first couple of songs were fine, but Maneater was third, and my saxophone and I weren't quite ready.  I had a key stuck shut (which I wasn't aware of), which caused me to play a wrong note at the beginning.  The solos had the right notes, but my reed was soft and misaligned, I was out of tune, and I pinched the reed shut a couple of times (so there was no sound).  In addition to my equipment problems, I'm getting into the bad habit of putting too much lower lip in my mouth, making the pinching even worse.  It only seems to manifest its...