October was really slow, so I'm using the down time to recover (mostly by doing nothing), but I also had some gigs and races and stuff.
Saturday, October 3, 2026: Woodstock, GA. I got a call at the beginning of the week from a guy who has a brass band, and they do offbeat arrangements of pop songs--it's weird, but some of it's pretty clever, and I hadn't played a gig with them in many years, so I said yes. There weren't a lot of details: $150, 2-6 PM, the address of the parking lot, and that it was part of a pub crawl. A day or two before, he sent about twenty German Oktoberfest songs, so I worked on those for a couple of hours.
I showed up to the gig, and it was me (saxophone), trombone, tuba, and I a drummer. The guy who'd hired me was not on the gig, and I guess I misunderstood what we were doing--we played a couple of the Oktoberfest songs, and then we walked down the street and parked in front of the next place, played a couple of songs, the other guys drank a beer, and we walked on to the next place with our iPads and instruments and cases. And on and on, for four hours!
I had understood it that we would be parked at a pub and the pub crawlers would go by, not the other way around!
Super sloppy gig--I think somebody was always lost in the charts, and the drummer had no charts, so if nobody cued him, he'd blow right through the ending and we'd have to figure out how to circle back and end the song definitively. And everything was some strange German song you'd never heard, so there was no way to get hear where everybody else was and jump back on track. I'm sure the multiple beers did not help with their accuracy, either.
We ended up finishing a half hour early--one of the guys had to bail to get to his next gig, but there was no one in charge and no one keeping an eye on us, so...I don't know! Maybe we should've made it a plan to hit all the places a little quicker and go home earlier.
My mom says I need to do a better job of vetting gigs like this one.
Saturday night, I went to the new jazz club in Atlanta (Decatur), Churchill Grounds to see the Matt Kaminsky Trio (with Micah Caldwell on guitar and Mike Dana on drums). Good stuff! The place is beautiful.
As far as playing a gig there, I was on a mass email that included about seven or eight potential dates, and I offered my availability to a couple of them, and heard nothing in reply. After about a week, I heard back that my email had gotten lost in the chaos, and that we could try again in the future. Sure! Send me some more dates! No reply. I'm guessing they're up to their eyeballs in day-to-day operations at the moment.
I've always been on the edge of the jazz scene in Atlanta anyway, so there's no big rush for me to line up a date.
Friday, October 9, 2026: Miramar Beach, FL. Yacht Rock was supposed to play a show in the Florida panhandle, but a hurricane came through there, and the whole thing got canceled.
I was also supposed to play a gig on Saturday with the Oktoberfest guy, but that gig got moved to Friday because the weather was going to be hitting Atlanta on Saturday, so I couldn't do it because we still thought the Yacht Rock gig was happening, but before that, I got a call about playing Saturday night, but I said no because I got called before the Oktoberfest gig moved to Friday.
Anyway, I didn't play any gigs this weekend. Finn and I watched most of the Georgia game.
I'd been working on this Michael Brecker transcription for a while, and I finally made a video of it.
If you're interested, here's the original song. The solo starts at 2:01.
Saturday, October 17, 2026: Atlanta, GA. I ran a 5K to help fight breast cancer. All the women in my immediate family have been affected, so this seemed like a worthy cause.
I wouldn't mention anything about this, except that I came in fourth place (!) out of 187 runners. Also, I got beat by a twelve year old, which was awesome. And the guy who came in first place was so much faster than everybody that I never saw him.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026: Atlanta, GA. Nick, Pete, and I did some TV promo. I thought it was going to be connected to our local gig on Thursday, but it seemed to be more generally connected to the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the band.
Due to copyright stuff, we played our original song Tropical Illusion, and submitted to questioning (I'm not good at that part). Nick's microphone made a bunch of crunchy noises during the performance, so the footage didn't make it very far out into the world.
Thursday, October 22, 2026: Atlanta, GA. We did the annual fundraiser for the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials. For the past few years, it's been at The Stave Room, which is unfortunate because the acoustics are not favorable for amplified sound (let's put it that way). It's converted warehouse space with metal ceilings and concrete floors, and nothing to soak up the sound.
Anyway, I got there at 3:20 PM, set up my gear, went for a run, and made it back for the 5:30 PM soundcheck.
"Good luck with your dinner." Fortunately, our rider was there, so I had peanut butter and an apple.
It was a dark and noisy gig...I was a bit bored. My repaired keyboard worked flawlessly, by the way.
After the show, I packed up, went home for a half hour (took a shower), and then headed off to meet the buses.
Friday, October 23, 2026: Huntsville, AL. Mars Music Hall. I've never been here. While we were hanging around in the loading dock before going in, two other buses pulled up to play the bigger room in this space--Sonic the Hedgehog Live! Huh. I watched a video so you don't have to--it's a rock band with strings and horns. Lots of reading charts off iPads.
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| wooooo |
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| catering |
The usual stuff: coffee (Pete Olson and I went to Starbucks around the corner), run, lunch, set up gear, shower...
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| flute stuff before soundcheck |
After soundcheck, I walked to the Publix to pick up my pub sub. Huntsville is nice!
I ate my dinner and played saxophone in the loading dock for about an hour.
Ok gig. Nice place, but smaller crowd, smaller energy. I would definitely come back again if we could. Maybe we could play here and Chattanooga as regular stops.
I woke up in the middle of the night to a strange sound--I thought maybe we were spinning the wheels in a patch of gravel--some accelerations, but the bus wouldn't move. Saturday morning, I was informed that we'd broken a belt in the engine, and our driver spent some time getting it fixed. I must've been hearing the engine trying to go with a broken belt. I guess we all slept through it, and the repair didn't take much time at all.
Saturday, October 24, 2026: Tuscaloosa, AL. Woke up just before 8 AM, just in time to hoof it over to the stage and set up my gear. Today we played in a tailgating situation before the University of Alabama football game. Set up and sound checked by 10 AM. Oof.
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| more clever setlist art by yours truly |
I predicted that the food choices would probably not be very vegetarian friendly (they were not), so after soundcheck, I walked up the street to Publix and got a pub sub.
Easy gig here--we played an hour, and it was fun for a little throw and go kind of vibe. And I got the Africa solo right. Woo!
We were invited to watch the game against Texas A&M. It was intense, as you might imagine, with the big crowd and the pom poms and the band and the flyover and the throngs of good ol' boys who can't believe that they're not running the ball more. I heard a lot of that.
Man, it was hot, too. We were on the sunny side of the stadium, and got cooked.
Made it through the first half before we had to go back to the buses.
The crew bus was having problems--no air conditioning!, but they opted to tough it out for the ride back to Atlanta so that we could leave on time. We thought they were going to ride in the front of our bus, but nobody came over.
I took a nap, and we landed back in Atlanta around 8:30 PM. Bama won, by the way, 31-20.
Saturday, October 31, 2026: Marietta, GA. On the subject of running, I ran the Haunted Hustle 5K and came in second place!
Saturday night, I went to Churchill Grounds to see my a few of my old friends play. I met guitarist Dan Baraszu in 1996 or 97 right when he moved to town; I've known organist Dave Ellington since he relocated to Atlanta from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And drummer Chris Burroughs has been a friend for nearly as long. They're a really good trio, and they played a bunch of originals--I've had enough Miles/Coltrane tributes.
