Before and After Christmas

Things have slowed waaaaaaaay down since mid December, but I did play a few more gigs here and there. My church gig continues to chug along, and because Christmas Eve was during the week, I got an extra service out of it. I also got a call to play two services after that with some friends at another church, so three on the night, which was pretty cool. All on flute, which was good...and tiring! I made the mistake of doing a normal day's worth of practicing at home, then playing all the prelude Christmas carols, and then playing the mass, so by the second service, my face was starting to get pretty fried. I recovered by midnight mass, but if this happens again, I guess I have to either play more leading up to the big day, or play less and literally save face!

On the Friday after Christmas, the Yacht Rock Revue played a show at the Alabama Theatre in Birmingham. What a beautiful place!

Lots of places to explore...

It's a really cool building--kind of reminds me of the "old building" at the IU School of Music (probably of the same vintage). It sounded great, too, though the lack of a standing section directly in front of the stage maybe wasn't the best for our crowd. Still, just under 1,300 showed up and stood up in their seats. I can dig it!

For us, this show took a while--the first fifteen songs felt like I was watching us play a gig. I didn't feel connected to anything until about halfway through. It doesn't come through on the broadcast, I don't think. The camera angle kind of makes it look like we're on a soundstage somewhere. Check it out!

Big Gig Week

This week of December is usually one of the busiest of the year, with Saturday usually being the pinnacle. There's even a term for this--#gigmas--which is slung around social media. In Atlanta, it seems to be a favorite of trumpet players, but my quick search of the internet indicates that it is also shared with oboists. Interesting.

Anyway, beyond this date (this year it's the 15th), the calendar slows down for most musicians. For us at Yacht Rock, we were fortunate to have two mid week gigs before our big holiday special on the 15th.

Tuesday: The Miller Theatre in Augusta. Beautiful room, easy load in, multiple dressing rooms, great acoustics. We played some sort of fundraiser that was not particularly well attended.

Still, what a great room! I would love to come back here for a regular Yacht Rock show. Excellent on all counts.

Thursday: Stamford, Connecticut. We had an early flight--9:40 AM--which meant that the carpool meet up was at 7:45, which meant that I had to leave home at 7, which meant that I had to get up at 6:30, so why was I texting Bencuya stupid shit at 1 AM? That's just what we do.

Arriving early in the afternoon gave us ample time to eat lunch and crash/run on the treadmill for an hour. I passed out in the green room for a while before the gig.

This gig was pretty rough. The Fantom I was issued (top keyboard) was in pretty bad shape--the card reader didn't work, so I had to import my settings from my laptop, a few control buttons didn't work, and a few keys didn't work. Great! I was also given some shitty Yamaha volume pedals. My whole setup was wonky.

There's more! This room sounded TERRIBLE, and the crowd was, for the most part, not interested. We played most of the gig to an at best sparsely populated dance floor. The majority was across the room with their backs to us.

Special shout out to the stink bug that crawled out of my wireless microphone receiver. Considering that it hasn't been outside of my fly-date-case since the Fenway/Boston gig a month earlier, that's impressive, and I would guess that it probably crawled IN there six weeks previous to that when we played an outdoor gig in Louisville. Can bugs hold their breath for that long? That thing earned its freedom.

Saturday: EPIC holiday special at The Roxy in Atlanta. Wow! 2,500+ in attendance.

For this one, we added Keisha and Kourtney Jackson on background vocals, a horn section (Rob Opitz, trumpet; John Sandfort, tenor sax and flute; and Tim Pitchford, trombone), and Pete's wife Alyssa on guest vocals.

The Roxy is an incredibly good room--looks great, sounds great, big stage, easy load in, loaders!--all my usual superlatives. We played really well (for the most part!). I had some weird nervousness issues that came and went in the first half of the gig (this weird thing where my embouchure would basically disintegrate while I was playing), but I had a solid night on all my horns once things finally settled down.

Here's the setlist:

That's it! We're off until December 28, when we appear at the Alabama Theatre in Birmingham. See y'all there.

BTM

I was fortunate to be available to play with Bumpin' the Mango Monday night, holding down the bari parts in a five piece horn section. The band is really good, the charts are great, and the song selection is fantastic--it's a thrill to take on a lot of the classic Tower of Power tunes and similar music. On top of the that, it's a good hang. Some of these guys I've known for twenty years at this point.

It went well, I think. Everybody seemed EXTREMELY happy with my playing, which makes me 1. wonder what the other subs have been doing on the gig; and 2. hope that I never get called again, because I already feel the pressure to live up to whatever I did Monday night.

Anyway, here are the two sets:

Chattanooga and Dalton

Friday night, we headed up I-75 for a show at The Signal in Chattanooga. We hadn't been here since the end of March. Good to be back! This was an excellent show--the crowd of around a thousand was fun but not obnoxious, the room sounded great, and we played well. Nick is still fighting his cold, so the setlist avoided most of his more difficult songs.

Saturday's gig in Dalton was only a half hour away, so killed a lot of time in Chattanooga before heading there. For me, it was the usual combination of sleeping as late as possible, getting some exercise, and then finding lunch. Pete and I dined at an Indian restaurant on Market Street.

This evening's show was a corporate Christmas party in the convention center. At the start of it, the most enticing thing was that were able to put the van and trailer inside the building, just behind the stage (making for a quick and dry load out).

The first set was a snoozer. On the break, we were all thinking about wandering through the next hour so that we could get back to Atlanta, when someone from the company came in an offered us a ton of money to play until midnight. Why yes, we'll take that offer!

The next set had a little more enthusiasm from both the band and the crowd, and though we were working around Nick's limited vocals, we were able to put together and an extra hour and fifteen minutes of music. Finished at midnight, home around 2 AM. Not a bad night after all.

Two More in Indy

Friday: We started the weekend with an early flight and crash landing in Indianapolis (slept the whole way!), meeting up with the van, gear, and crew just after noon. So...lunch.

chana masala from India Garden buffet

We still had plenty of time to waste, so we went ahead and checked into our hotel. I also went for a run.

the Northwestern U. football team headed to the stadium

Peyton Manning statue!

This evening's gig was a joint 50th birthday party. Very tame. Nick was super sick with a cold and we drastically shuffled the setlist, but nobody seemed to notice.

Saturday: Public show at the Murat! We've finally left The Vogue behind and moved on to a bigger room in Indy. The ballroom holds 2,000 people, and we sold it out.

dinner at The Garden Table on Mass Ave

Soooo...pretty good gig tonight! Nick was still sick, so the setlist was duly adjusted (though we did pull a soundcheck version of Elvira off).

One with the Indy horn section. 

Finally, next year's schedule has been announced with great fanfare. 

Turkey Time

Two Yacht Rock gigs this week--the day before Thanksgiving, and the day after.

Wednesday night was pretty good. The only song that kind of bit me was Minute by Minute--there's a tricky spot where I have one beat to change sounds and get both hands lined up correctly. Sometimes I need a little extra time. That was the case this evening. Everything else was fine. I never could really find my groove, though.

Other thoughts: local jazz legend Kevin Bales was up front checking us out all night. It was cool that he was there checking us out, but I think it got in my head that I needed to impress him.

Alyssa Olson (Pete's wife) guested on Islands in the Stream. She sounded great and looked to be having more fun than anybody in the room.

Here's video of the gig.



Friday's "Black Friday" gig unfortunately didn't Steely Dan's Black Friday (which would've been cool). In fact, with a couple of subs in tow, the setlist stayed much closer to songs we've been playing for years. Mark Cobb and Mark Bencuya were our designated survivors for the evening, so we had Ganesh Giri Jaya on drums and Dustin Cottrell on keyboards filling in.

This show seemed to flow a little better than Wednesday night, and I didn't start watching the clock until we were well into the right hand column. The crowd was really good on this night, too, and that helped. Whatever it was, I was quite a bit more comfortable.


This one was also broadcast across the internet:

Listen People, It's too Cold for Outdoor Gigs

Two outdoor gigs this week...in mid November...what the hell? I'm sure it's fine when you're walking around (and can LEAVE WHEN YOU GET UNCOMFORTABLE!), but I'm sitting on a stool touching a cold plastic keyboard or a cold piece of metal, and I like the check, but my hands go numb and we need to stop this outdoor gig in November bullshit.

Thursday: Off to Bluffton, South Carolina for a food festival thing. We played this gig last year (you can read about it here). I'm still not exactly sure who's attending this or why. Also, why does it have to be so late in the year? A month earlier would've been much better, temperature-wise. 

green room boredom

this is about twenty degrees too cold for me

Fortunately for me, Kip had a heater brought to the stage, which we planted right behind me. My hands still got cold, but I was able to occasionally reach up and thaw them out when things got really dire.

Basically, this was a nifty corporate gig.

Friday: We raced back to Atlanta, dropped Zach (half of our sound crew) off at the airport, went home for a couple of hours, and then returned to the airport to catch a flight to Boston. I scored an upgrade to Delta Comfort--lots of legroom.

I watched most of the HBO Documentary about Robin Williams. Fortunately (I guess), we landed right as things were about to get depressing at the end of his life. I don't think I need to see the rest of it.

In the hotel room, I watched most of The Shape of Water. It's REALLY weird. Like, sex with Amazonian-swamp-creature weird. I don't need to see that ever again.

Saturday: 7:30 AM lobby call, and it's 40 degrees outside. This was the basic framework for today's gig. We played a tailgate party for the Harvard/Yale football game at Fenway Park. Once again, I like the gig, but holy shit is it cold.

soundcheck

our green room/tent was toasty warm

why God, why?

This one was not too terrible. I mean, it was crazy cold, but we only played for an hour an a half, so just as I was reaching the limit with frozen fingers, the show was over. As you can see, the crowd response was ok, but it wasn't really a concert, so it's understandable that there wasn't a giant mass of people directly in front of us.

Go Harvard! (their alums hired us)

The bass amp started whistling like a boiling tea kettle in the last fifteen minutes. Kip and the local crew guys were on it pretty quickly with a spare.

I had Indian food for lunch. Excellent.

Harvard won.

After lunch, we headed to the airport for our flight home. This perfect six month old was in front of me, but it wouldn't have mattered if he'd been a little terror--I was asleep for nearly all of the ride home.